The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
My town has just started up a historic committee to collect and preserve historical documents and information.
We're starting to collect papers, books, maps, pictures, etc, but we're trying to determine what we should get in the way of scanning equipment to digitize the items.
As we expect the materials to trickle in, we'd like to return them back to the citizens in a timely manner and don't want to go the route of renting higher-end scanners, but would prefer something of decent quality that could do the bulk of the digitization.
Are there certain features that we should look for? Would a flatbed scanner be recommended, or is there something better to deal with maps and other large items?
Joe
I would think that the first criteria to consider are maximum size of document and colour capability. You probably must have colour if you want to scan maps and pictures, and even A3 is going to be inadequate for most maps. I suggest that you split the scanning into two sections. 1 - standard A4 (or possibly A3) black/white/grey-scale (possibly colour) for routine jobs and 2 - large items that cannot be scanned on the above equipment. The second group will be outsourced.
It is a bit of a long read, but I would suggest someone take a look at Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Creation of Raster Image Master Files. It's a very handy reference work for informing scanning decisions.
It is probably a good idea to think a bit about what you imagine spending most of your time doing. If you are going to be doing a lot of books, it might be better to think about getting some digital cameras and setting up a book scanning station. For example, see this nice instructable on setting up a DIY book scanner. If you imagine primarily working with loose materials (photographs, letters, etc.) then you can likely use a rather inexpensive USB scanner. If you think there is going to be a fair bit of large or irregular sized items it might be worth looking at much larger bed scanners, but in that case it might similarly be in your best interest to just purchase some cheap lighting, a decent digital camera, and a tripod.