The Chesaning Area Historical Museum is pleased to announce the recent addition of a high resolution book scanner to our line up of digital archiving equipment.
Unlike with a traditional flatbed scanner, this new scanner is able to capture an image of a book while it is sitting face up. The user simply needs to flip over to the next page without lifting and repositioning the entire book. This greatly increases the speed at which material can be scanned, and is also less likely to damage the original book.
Among the features included with the new scanner is built-in optical character recognition (OCR), which can convert a scanned page into machine readable-text. This will make the entire content of the book searchable in the same way that you can search for information online.
We have of course chosen one of the most important sources of local historical information in our collection as the first first book to be added to our digital archive.
The Chesaning Illustrated was first published in 1903, and contains a comprehensive history of Chesaning up to that time period, as well as a thorough description of the contemporary village and it most prominent residents. It also contains a large number of photographs, many of which can no longer be found in any other sources.
The digital version of the Chesaning Illustrated can be accessed by going to the new download section of the Chesaning History website, which you can reach by going HERE, or by using the the link at the top of the page.
This section of the website will continue to be updated with new content as more material is added to the museum’s digital archive.
If you’d like to help us cover the cost of this new equipment, you can go HERE to make an online donation to the Chesaning Area Historical Society, or use the donate link at the top of this page.