Quote:
Originally Posted by Iain
There are two main problems I've found with 70s and pre-70s books. One is that the paper is coarser and stickier than more modern books (either because it was made that way or because it has deteriorated) and this makes pages more likely to stick together and double feed.
The second is that the glue appears to be less consistent in how far up into the book it's gone. If you get a page turning in the scanner, then my experience is pretty much that it was stuck or partially stuck to another one.
There are some tricks with this; you can cut a little further into the book, is an obvious one. But when the book is cut look at the cut edges. Sometimes you can see the glued pages as a line. Bend the book. When pages are stuck, you can feel a different sort of resistance. Next you can riffle the pages. I think this may even help the sticky paper syndrome.
My approach (being a geek) has been to write some software which runs the scanner and, having assembled a (large!) tiff file lets you rescan pages which have misfed in the main run. ( iaindowns.wordpress.com if you're interested!).
Iain
Good luck. |
Iain has some excellent suggestions. I've found "riffling" (or fanning) the pages does help prevent pages from sticking together but some books used some really rough surfaced paper and the pages just seem to drag others right along. When I run into that, I mutter sweet nothings under my breath (sometimes louder), fan the pages in eight directions immediately before feeding them to the scanner and just watch the scanner (specifially page numbers as each page is spit out) so I can see when a multifeed occurs. My scanner will detect misfeeds but it is often difficult to determine how many pages were involved in a multifeed unless I saw it happen.
Glue seepage that the guillotine misses are a pain in the...ah...neck. Older books seem to be more susceptable to the problem as well as books that have too small a gutter to allow chopping off a large enough slice of the spine to make sure all the glue gets removed.. When undetected, two or more pages that still have even a fine line line or spot of glue will cause my scanner to jam, often mangling the pages. While what Iain suggests to detect pages still glued together frequently do work, I've found the only sure way to avoid the problem is to flip through all the pages before feeding them to the scanner. I've done this often enough that I can have the next batch of pages flipped through before the previous batch has finished scanning (and I have a fast scanner).
Most books I have little or no trouble with but there will always be the ornery ones that will make me wonder why I ever embarked on this project. After a while, I developed a "feel" for which books are going to be troublesome and can act to minimize the grief.