Atlas Scanning

Last week we set up our overhead Minolta 7000 Camera. This machine is designed to take digital images of books with pages too large to fit into a desktop scanner. The Minolta works much slower than a normal scanner. The operator needs to turn and scan each page, one by one. Once scanned each page is cropped, one by one. Cropping reduces the size of the image to contain only the map itself. The first books we will scan on the Minolta are Atlases. These are old, rare, beautiful books filled with historical significance.

Today we started scanning an 1871 Atlas of Massachusetts.

Below is an example of the Lowell map from the 1871 Atlas. Obvious, the actual scanned image is easier to read than the image I transferred to the blog.