This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
WHY do people think everything needs to be cropped to hell just to fit on their phone. The screen rotates. Just twist it around ya lazy bastards.
Anyhow, here's a link to the full size video that isn't pointlessly cut down by 75%: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QThaHpkFVzw
This video comes from the official Internet Archive TikTok page. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse lol!
https://www.tiktok.com/@weareinternetarchive/video/7329355972428696874
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=QThaHpkFVzw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thank you, Internet Archive.
Please remember to make a donation to the Internet Archive for the invaluable work they do!
We so appreciate your efforts, but ya'll need more funding so you can start working smart and not hard. From the looks of things, I see no reason why page flips can't be automated there.
I just made a donation. Please use it to save this poor woman from the tedious task you've shown us today.
I think this is one of those things that seems like it should be easy to automate, but actually has lots of hidden complexity.
They probably don't use this to scan commonly available books, because for those you can just cut the spine off the book and scan the pages in a regular scanner.
This is likely used for books that need to be preserved and can't be damaged during the scanning process.
How do you make a machine that will always turn exactly one page and never tear a page, while adapting for different page sizes and thicknesses, and avoiding the static charge that can make pages stick together? All for less money than it costs to pay people to operate this machine.
Iirc they did experience with automation before and did get it to copy well...
But like you said, it would damage books pretty frequently. That's not what you'd want for old and fragile materials which are rather irreplaceable.
We should start doing charity style TV ads.
"You, too, can help us build page turners and save the lives of dozens of archivists. Just £2 a month will allow Margaret to finally rest."
I'd just use a bandsaw to cut off the spine and stick it in a document feeder.
Leave that poor woman alone you psycho!
If the book is not that easily available (old, rare), it's much better to keep it intact.
Wow that seems painfully slow/tedious. Why isn't it automatized? I think I saw a robot do like 20 pages a second on a yt some years ago.
Do you remember the results of those speed scans? Crooked pages, parts of the document cut off, blurry scans, etc.
It was a lazy method that resulted in a lot of junk data.
I think this is what I saw. Not quite 20 pages/s hahah and also a different method.
Google have digitised a lot of books using some more advanced tech, though they started out with something a little like this.
That would be interesting to see!
This is probably the method that gives you the best quality (deskewing, lighting) without cutting the back of the book and feeding it into a scanner. (AFAIK)
I saw a book scanner similar to this one that used a vacuum to turn pages but otherwise same principle.
There are DIY tutorials for that for those interested: https://www.diybookscanner.org/en/intro.html
There should be a law that should any book go out of print, to be digitized and made available online. Publishers shouldn't dictate which books are allowed to be consumed once they allow it out of print when digital versions cost next to nothing to make available for a nominal price.
That goes for authors owning the copyright, as well.
And limited to 25 years. This 100 years is bull shit.
Do you really work there?
If so… We love you.
Today I learned that firefox doesn't like to play certain types of mp4 files. I also learned that you can copy a video link and paste it into VLC media player and it will play!
Watching these books being archived is amazing, I would love to do this!
I also learned that you can copy a video link and paste it into VLC media player and it will play!
You can also use this trick to download YouTube videos without the need of a 3rd party website!
Copy the URL of the YouTube video you wanna download
VLC / Media / Open network stream... And paste your URL
Once the video has opened, Tools / Media Information
Copy the URL in the "Location" field and paste it into your web browser, you should have the option to save the video
It's a couple of steps but once you memorize what you need to do it's a million times faster (and I'd wager equally times as private) than finding one of those websites to give you a link.
MP4 is just a container, the specific audio/video streams can be one of several different codecs, and if you don't have the codec used it won't work. If you can identify the encoding you could probably just download a codec and be good to go.
Edit: for this video the video codec is
Codec: MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265) (hvc1)
and audio codec is
Codec: MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a)
Kids in university watching this: 😯
Automatic page turners are unreliable?
May I bring my son to visit? I know it's typically only for events. He will crack up at the statues and be underwhelmed by the two racks containing the entire Internet.
I don't often donate since it's mostly in USD, but internet archive was one of the few that I did.
How do you reliably turn pages that fast without accidentally grabbing two pages and skipping? Im impressed!
Ah, this takes me back to my college times when I scanned textbooks one page at a time at the library because I couldn't afford to buy one and renting a book was scarce
Firefox: Video can't be played because the file is corrupt.
Chrome: Plays audio only.
Why are we hosting things on such shonky shit?
What OS are you on? The video plays fine for me in Firefox on both Windows and Android.
Also I think the codec is more likely to blame than the hosting provider.
Reminds me of the hours I've spent scanning in articles from print journals for interlibrary loan.