Hello all! I'm an undergrad completing a research project for my Honours thesis. I'm currently working through a diary that is proving quite difficult to understand due to the author's poor handwriting, and thus is taking a lot of time to decipher. I'm looking at this diary currently on 35mm microfilm but only have it on loan from government archives for a few more days. My university has a ScanPro® 3000 All-In-One™. Is there a way to digitize this document quickly instead of manually going through each page. I'm working with a 20 year period of diaries and it will take ages to go through manually. Perhaps another software or a feature I've missed in Scanpro? ! Any advice? I'm not experienced with this technology. Cheers!
You are in luck, that model of the ScanPro does have the autoscan feature: https://e-imagedata.com/automatic-scanning/ I don't know if there are any instructions online, the company wants you to run every piddly problem through their tech service for $$ so they do not put user manuals online...
You are going to need to suck up to those archivists though. Baked goods. Custom engraved staple remover spatulas. Cash donations to the student worker pizza fund. Because not only are they the only ones who know how to do it, we usually mount these rolls up before we leave and run them over night, so the microfilm reader isn't tied up all day while someone needs it, so you're going to be asking a pretty big favor. Would I do it for you? Probably, if you had been hanging out in my reading room for several days looking more and more distressed... But anyway, yes, it can be done, but you'd best put on your most pathetic little undergrad face and get begging!