Hello everyone, 

The Hosford History Center and Lawrence Archives at Olivet College are in the beginning stages of digitizing our collection, and we would greatly appreciate some feedback on our chosen equipment and software before we purchase them. 

Some background information on our institution and collection: we are a small to medium sized archive that focuses on collecting and preserving the history of Olivet College, and to a lesser extent the town around it. Our collection is fairly diverse, containing both loose and bound full-sized newspapers, yearbooks dating from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, loose paper documents, regular sized, oversized, and panoramic photographs, bound and loose college catalogs dating back as far as the 1840s, and a variety of 3D items, such as clothing, trophies, and sports equipment. 

In order to digitize our collection, we have chosen the following equipment: 

• The Bookeye 5 V3 Book Scanner (for bound items, as well as fragile items that would be damaged by a flatbed scanner)

• The Epson Expression 12000XL Photo Scanner (for photos and loose paper items)

• A Nikon D3500 DSLR Camera (for items that cannot be digitized via a scanner)

Additionally, we have chosen PastPerfect Version 5 as our collections management software, Omeka.net to host our digital files and exhibits online, and ABBYY FineReader PDF as an OCR software to transcribe our documents into machine readable text.

For those of you who have used any of this software or equipment: Do they work well? Are there any major problems you’ve encountered? Are there any alternatives you would suggest over these?

Thank you all in advance for taking time out of your day to help us!

-Caitlyn Tanner, and the rest of The Hosford History Center and Lawrence Archives staff