Before I had the chance to digitize a cookbook myself, I was curious about how libraries and archives actually complete the process. I decided to document my experience, so now you can learn about digitization too!
The first thing I had to do was go through my university's library catalogue and determine which books were part of their collection. I found a few, but ultimately narrowed it down to just one, The Canadian Receipt Book. In this image, you can see that I am browsing the catalogue online and filling out an item request form for the Archives and Special Collections. I've written down a request for The Cook Not Mad, although in the end I chose another book.
Once I had selected my cookbook, I was able to go to the scanning room and begin the process. The first step was to start up the computer and the scanner. I also cleaned the surface of the scanner, to insure that there was no debris or dirt which might create an imperfect image. Once the computer was running, I opened the Epson Scan program. I had to make sure the settings were correct, for example, that the resolution was set to 400dpi.
Finally, it was time to start scanning! The screenshot below shows what the screen looked like after doing a preview scan. The preview scan is important to ensure that the pages are scanning nicely and neatly, without any dust, blurring, or crookedness.
It is important to scan each page separately, so I used a marquee tool to select one page.
Now that the page was scanned, I had to open it in Photoshop and do some minor tweaking. This was to improve readability and reduce bleedthrough.
And repeat 192 times! That's the number of pages in The Canadian Receipt Book. In all, it took me about 5 - 6 hours to scan the entire book, plus a couple hours to correct the images in Photoshop, convert the .tif files to .jpg, and merge all the images into a single .pdf file.
