Digitization Projects/autores.uy

autores.uy

Overview

autores.uy is both a digitization project of books, artwork and audio and a database for copyright clearence created by volunteers of Creative Commons Uruguay and Wikimedia Uruguay. The first goal was to gather information about Uruguayan authors and their works that have been scattered or unavailable. We are especially interested in authors' rights and public domain status. In Uruguay, authors' works are under this status for 50 years after the authors' death.

We create databases that are available under the CC Attribution - Share Alike License (CC by SA) and offer filters to be searched by the author's names, surnames, discipline, public domain status, sex, date of birth and death. All of this data allows for the study of authorship evolution in Uruguay, and helps to establish cultural public policies.

For those authors that are under public domain we include a link to their digitized works that are available in platforms like Internet Archive or Wikisources. In some cases, taking into account digitizations from universities, other institutions, and sometimes uploaded material digitized by ourselves.

At the moment, we have information of 12208 authors from Uruguay and nearly 1502 works linked (that are either digitized by the volunteer group or copied from already existing sources like IA, Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay etc.).

Copyright clearance

Te first and main focus of autores.uy is the creation of a copyright clearance database that would allow us or any other project to asses the copyright status of any Uruguayan work. This has proven a long running work of information gathering, database scrapping, and plainly indexing author's information from biography books, catalogs, etc. After we had a sizeable amount of information, we started doing a selection process of the author's and works we already knew were in public domain in Uruguay. That's the opposite of choosing a book and doing the copyright clearence after, in a case by case basis and it has proven an efficient way for us.

Equipment and budget

Depending of the type of work we have to digitize we have chosen to use a DIY Scanner, one or two flatbeds scanners and a tripod/reflex camera setup.

DIY Scanner

Our DIY Scanner its a device that allow us to digitize books in a non-destructive way. Using two cameras, the book is opened around 90° (in opposition of the 180° that's needed in a flatbed scanner), and two shots are taken of the odd and even pages at once, using a trigger or a Raspberry Pi + display setup. This is a fast method and can be constructed downloading the cuts from the official page and following the instructions or buying a premade kit. The premade kit costs around $ 1,750.00, and building it yourself with cheap cameras (both have to be the same model and supported by the CHDK hacking or gPhoto library) can cut costs by half.

For autores.uy we use a 2012 model of DIY Scanner called "Hackerspace Scanner" and two en:Canon PowerShot SX50 HS cameras, as well as a Rasberry Pi model 3 and a display for controlling the camera shots, re shots, zoom level, etc.

A4 Flatbed scanner

For some books that can be opened 180°, we use a A4 Flatbed scanner Canon Lide 120, that can be brought for less than 100u$s. This is an affordable but slower method than the DIY Scanner and we use it mostly for single pages or short documents.

A3 Flatbed scanner

For bigger books that can be opened 180°, we brought a en:Multi-function printer Brother MFC-J6730DW that costs around 500u$s. This allow us to scan up to A3 size books, and also documents and books that can be disassembled and fed to the Automatic Document Feeder. That option is the fastest but it can be rarely used in old books.

Tripod/reflex camera

Team members

The main team behind autores.uy is integrated by: 1 IT programmer, 3 librarian and 2 community managers and a group of volunteers.