WHAT GOES IN TO CREATING AND PUBLISHING
AN OUR HOUSE TREASURES EBOOK
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Our House Treasures begins the publishing process, in most cases, by first obtaining a physical copy of each book. Due to the age of each resource, a non-destructive method of scanning is utilized, so as not to damage the physical book.
With many of our books originally printed in the late 1800/early 1900’s, we have obtained works that are in excellent condition and others, well, not-so-much! One of our recent projects arrived with the book spine off and the pages rubber-banded together!
So, for our purposes, we utilize an Archivist Quill Book Scanner, made available by Tenrec Builders, LLC.
Fig. 1: Archivist Quill Book Scanner
This type of book scanner allows Our House Treasures to perform high quality scanning while causing minimal additional stress to the document or book that is being published. The scanner is great for large-scale projects — it’s quick and precise!
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After each scanning is complete, OCR (optical character reading) is then performed on all of the pages.
Fig. 2: Sample text-to-OCR procedure.
Many older-genre texts include vocabulary incorporating characters from greek, latin, or languages other than English. The OCR process may not recognize these characters; manual insertion is necessary in order to guarantee maintaining the integrity and originality of each book. A comparative review is conducted and proofreading of text is completed.
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Many vintage books include works of art from its respective time-period. These may be simple black and white sketches or color prints.
Every image is inspected and we make necessary enhancements to image quality, including contrast, brightness, background color, sharpness, focus — of course, being limited by the quality of the original document. OHT then processes each image to create a high-definition, scalable version to enhance the reader’s appreciation of the artwork.
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