Our equipment and process
Scanning has become a very common and inexpensive process. Today, a scanner for home rivals the best business quality scanner of just six or seven years ago. They are easily found in office supply stores for less than the price of a carton of cigarettes. However, because of the need for very high quality graphic preservation in some cases coupled with the fact that much of the material is 'perfect bound' or book bound, there was concern that flat-bed scanning would inevitably result in damage that would hasten document demise.
Note: No companies listed below have provided any inducements for their mention here. Because we anticipate not only other Masonic Grand Lodges but also local historical societies and others may benefit from our experience, we have listed the methodology and equipment here. Additional details are available from the Webmaster.
After examining many document capture options, it was decided that a Book Drive DIY Scanner from Atiz Company was the 'best of breed' for our project. This equipment provides the opportunity to create actual photographs of the material throughout the breadth of the project.
The Book Drive DIY's use of actual digital cameras (rather than a scanner mechanism) makes this possible. The time it takes to move through a document in this way is amazingly quick and subjects the material to FAR less handling than if they were being flipped over hundreds of times to accommodate a flat-bed scanner. In addition, it can address a wide variety of publications from the smallest matchbook to full newspaper size if necessary. In the 'proof' phase of testing, it was amazing to watch the number of pages that could be photographed in the space of just a couple of hours. With two people working together (one to carefully turn pages with the other verifying the photographs were taken correctly), scanning 300-400 pages per hour seemed quite reasonable in fact. While the equipment is large to use in a home next to already existing computer equipment, having a laptop made installation at a different physical location (attic or spare bedroom, for example) quite manageable. Support of and interest in our progress by Atiz personnel from all levels of the company including its president, has been phenomenal and has far, far exceeded our expectations.
The Atiz Company's product also includes (at no additional cost) software which automates the ability to provide consistently uniform photographs without endless manual manipulation. It straightens and adjusts the photographs two at a time (side by side just as the photographs were taken by the dual cameras) making an otherwise tedious and time consuming process much more simple. Our Proceedings will not be manipulated in this software as it is really not necessary to have a 'good looking' copy of the original for reference purposes. However, when we move to Lodge Histories, this will be critical and we are pleased to have this software in our solutions kit.
One of the overarching goals of this project was to have the results online and accessible by search engines. To do so, we must take the photographic produced and have it scanned through an OCR program. Unlike their competitors, Atiz does not bundle or tie their equipment to a home-grown OCR software. In a field where advances are made each year, they have chosen to concentrate on the capture and automation portions of the process and leave OCR to specialists in that field. They do offer recommendations of two software programs, however, and provide information on maximizing DIY output for the OCR process. After using trial versions of each, Abbyy FineReader was selected for our Optical Character Recognition task. The product advertised its strong compatibility with the digital camera-capture methodology and their claims seemed to hold true. Our initial questions to the company (headquartered in Russia) were addressed extremely quickly and thoroughly. It was a pleasure to get prompt and easily understandable responses which also anticipated the questions we had not asked! Customer service for both Atiz and Abbyy can only be rated as extraordinary! While it is not the most commonly recognized product in the marketplace, Abbyy FineReader has proven to be an excellent choice. By adding commonly used Masonic words and Maine towns to the user dictionary, we have increased the accuracy rate even higher than the initial 95+% on many pages. Working with antiquated type faces and printing that was imperfect at the outset, we think that Atiz picked a winner in their recommendation. Regardless, we do not rely on software alone and every single page is proof-read separately from the OCR process by a second person.
All of the web sites for the Grand Lodge of Maine have been built using Adobe's Macromedia Suite and thus this section was also created in Dreamweaver (currently Version 8). Standards-based web accessibility was important to ensure easy access by the public.
Finally, in order to ensure that the material created could ultimately be placed into a variety of emerging formats which may someday become standards, all material will be moved into 'long document creation' software. While few software companies produce 'consumer-priced' programs, Corel's Ventura and Adobe's FrameMaker have long been good choices for this task. There is, on the part of the Webmaster, concern about the long-term viability of both programs since neither has been updated regularly or recently. However, Adobe has publicly stated that FrameMaker will be updated as needed and at selection time there were rumors of a new version while the rumors about its competitor were that their offering will be abandoned. The most current version of FrameMaker provided more 'standards output' options than Ventura. Accordingly, FrameMaker 7.2 was chosen although it is realized that a pending release of their InDesign product (which is expected to be much more integrated with the former Macromedia line including Dreamweaver) may provide a full and robust option for long document processing during 2007. We will use 'best of breed' as we move forward, not relying on what we have today.
From a personal perspective, being able to get accurate, informative answers using OUR chosen method of communication was very important at the outset. As we looked at scanning methodologies (and there are MANY!), we were often met with an attitude that expected we would comply to THEIR chosen method of communication, invariably phone. In the case of one product under consideration, we sent an e-mail to the address on their web site asking for very rough cost figures. It was ignored for 10 days. We sent a second e-mail. The reply was: "Do you have a phone number at which I can contact you?" (This, of course, ignored completely the paragraph in our initial message saying to use e-mail as we were at a very preliminary stage of inquiry. If a product was to cost tens of thousands of dollars it would be removed from initial consideration quickly.) The answer from the "Account Executive" was, after another exchange saying that we just wanted information followed several days later by a reply which again failed to give it but simply asked yet again for a phone number, that they had several products and she wanted to ask questions. Why she couldn't have written them down is beyond our comprehension but those who look for service and responsiveness should appreciate that if the sales process doesn't put the customer's needs, wants and wishes ahead of their formulaic methodology of sales, it's not going to be a very fruitful relationship down the road. From our first contact with Atiz, they were EXCELLENT and answered every detail as well as anticipating the 'next question' as well. For a $400 software product, Abbyy made the inquirer feel as if they were the single most important user of their product. Again: we've received NO consideration from either company and neither knew what we'd write (if anything) about them. They've just done SO well, they both deserve a 'pat on the back'. Kudos!
Our choices have been grounded in evaluation of multiple scenarios and we believe that they will prove to be good ones as time moves on. Stay tuned!
March 1, 2007
Ed King, Webmaster/Project Lead