Ancestry.com - Low Budget, High-tech Genealogy: "Bound books present another challenge because Jim does not want to unbind any of the books that remain intact. Likewise, he doesn't want to damage the pages or the book binding by placing the book on the flatbed scanner. The first books he scanned were already unbound, but to continue the project he needed a book scanner. Unfortunately, a professional book scanner costs about $50,000. There was no way the county could spend that kind of money, so Jim built his own!

Using construction grade plywood, Jim built a cradle with adjustable, hinged leaves to support the large ledger books. He erected a simple metal shelving unit in his office, and added four fluorescent lighting units extending beyond the periphery of the shelving. Next, he clamped a wooden arm across the top of the shelf on which he had placed the book cradle and securely attached the digital camera to it. To hold the book page flat while photographing it, he used a clear piece of Plexiglass.

Jim's first attempts at photographing book pages were frustrating because there was a distinctly visible reflection on the Plexiglass in the pictures. He tried adjusting the positions of the fluorescent lights without success.

'I finally figured it out,' he laughs. 'It was the reflection of the ceiling light in the office. Once I turned the light off when photographing, it worked just fine.'
The light from the four 'book scanner' lights is sufficient for doing his other work in his office while photographing book pages. Unfortunately, though, he has already worn out the remote trigger for the camera with all the images he has taken.

The page images from the camera are captured in .TIFF format and then transferred to the computer's hard drive. Corel Photo-Paint is used to rotate and crop the images. During that process, the images are named for the pages they represent and saved as .GIF files. They are also run through the program script, but each image must be manually adjusted for brightness, contrast, intensity, and gamma. Each image is then viewed online to make sure it is as readable as possible. When Jim is satisfied that he has a readable image, he releases it to the ColdFusion program for creation of the HTML. Like the scanned image files, these .GIF images are also archived to CD-ROM."