FAQ: Common Digitizing Issues

We're extremely excited to exhibit your sketchbook in the first draft of the Digital Library. The library is an ever-evolving art project fueled by artists from around the world. This is just the beginning — we're going to be constantly revising the photography of the artwork and improving the viewer's experience and interaction. Community has always been the goal at Art House Co-op, and the library is no exception. We'll soon be leveraging the public to help us catalog the artwork to create a searchable database of tags, curate personal collections of books and pages that can be shared with others, and identify pages that may need to be re-photographed.

We'll be the first to admit that we're taking baby steps as we learn how to build this massive digital archive of physical artwork (in fact, we're pretty sure this is the largest collection of digitized sketchbooks ever assembled!), so this is the perfect place to lend us a hand by letting us know what needs to be fixed.

Is your digitized book in need of some attention or revision? Please let us know by Flagging your book if you see an issue. We want the digital library to look its best, so keep in touch and we'll get your book fixed right up!

Some trends we've notice that pop up every now and then:

1. Only the left-hand or right-hand pages are showing up. Our digitizer photographs all left-hand pages and all right-hand pages separately. If one side is missing from your digitized book for some reason, we can quickly and easily find and upload the opposite side files. Just let us know!

2. The pages get all out of order and don't match up. Sometimes when we're digitizing, one of the cameras will fire twice in a row or miss a page by accident. This can really throw off the flow of an entire book, but it's a very quick fix. Flag your book if you see this problem and we'll get it sorted out ASAP.

3. A page is blurry.
   Pages with low contrast sometimes give the cameras a tough time when it comes to focusing. If you notice an out of focus page, please flag it so we can reshoot and replace it.

4. There's a gap or reflective thing between the left and right page.
   Our digitizing rig shoots each page separately and then stitches the left and right page together so as to reduce wear and tear on the books by not having to open the pages wide and put pressure on the spine like you would with a flatbed scanner. The thing you see going down the middle is a part of the a sheet of glass that goes over the pages to make sure light is distributed evenly, reduce glares, and to keep the pages pressed flat. On thicker books, we've noticed that our cropping process sometimes has a tough time cropping that part out. We're working on coming up with alternate crop settings for different book thicknesses. In the meantime, please flag it so we know to go back and re-crop it.

We've put together a quick introduction video about Naomi, our main digitizer, and the digitizing rig over here:
http://www.arthousecoop.com/digitizing

Thank you for your help building the Digital Library!