Due to the nature of the project, the biggest requirement for the equipment to be purchased was that everything needed to be easily packed up and transportable from place to place. At the same time, however, we did not want to sacrifice being able to capture high-quality scans in favour of portability. After some research, we settled on the following equipment which combines quality and portability:
Dell Laptops
We have acquired two Dell Precision 7710 laptops for the project. Both laptops are equipped with Adobe Photoshop, which we are using to edit our scans to prepare them for online access as well as long-term preservation.
Epson Scanners
We have also acquired two Epson Perfection V800 Photo scanners to take with us on our site visits. These machines take high-quality scans of loose sheets of paper, photographs, film, and negatives. Because of the high resolution we scan items at, scans can take anywhere from 60 seconds to 5 minutes!
XcaneX Book and Document Scanner
The other equipment we use for scanning is the XcaneX Book and Document Scanner, which can be used for larger documents or bound volumes. The resulting scans are a lower resolution than those created by the Epson Scanners, but capturing a scan takes only a few seconds per page. The height of the scanner’s camera is adjustable to easily capture a variety of document sizes. The scanner also has some Optical Character Recognition capabilities which allows for scanned texts to become searchable.
Audio Cassette Converter
The Ion Tape Express Plus Tape-to-Digital Converter & Player will allow us to convert audio cassettes to a digital format. It plays both chrome and normal tapes and works both using batteries as well as through USB.
