In the spring of 2012 I was working at the Massillon Public Library in Massillon, OH. As a substitute, I was looking for a project to work on during the times I was working. One project that was suggested to me involved digitizing the yearbooks and city directories within their local history room. They had previously built a book scanner, but no one had the opportunity to begin using it.
I started with a couple of city directories that were lent to the library but were not in our collection. From there I began on the collection that belonged to us. The process involved photographing each page using the cameras attached to the book scanner. One camera took images of the left pages and one camera took images of the right pages. Once the book had been photographed, I imported the images onto my computer due to my personal access to certain software such as Photoshop that the library did not have.
In Photoshop, I adjusted the images and saved them in another format. Once the images were all processed, I imported them all in page order into Adobe Acrobat and created one PDF file of the book. Updating the site was a bit of an issue with the former Massillon Memory site, so I asked to have WordPress installed in order to make it easier to update the collection. I used Scribd to host the files because they offered a file viewer that could be embedded into the page itself allowing patrons to view the books right on the site without needing to download them, though they could if they wanted to.
Since I left, the approach has changed for how images are digitized and uploaded. The layout for the website I created with WordPress is now slightly broken from the original creation. The documents I digitized as well were removed and rescanned after the purchase of a new book scanner. The newly digitized copies are now available through Ohio Memory. To learn more about the current Massillon Memory project, please feel free to explore their site.