What is the optimal setup for scanning/photographing documents in the archives?
I have done some archival research at NARA II and one of the presidential libraries. My research is document based and I used my cell phone along with the app TurboScan to take photos of the documents, combine multi-page documents as one pdf, and then transfer to my laptop so I can get them on Zotero. It seemed to me that holding the cell phone above the documents to take the photos was very inefficient.
I purchased one of those stands that positions the cell phone above the documents. It came with a shutter remote (that does not work with the TurboScan app. However, I still need to stand to operate the cell phone to make sure the document being photographed is lined up properly.
What is an efficient way to capture documents while in the archives?
Thank you!
The optimal setup is the one you're most comfortable with, of course, but for me, I've found that more traditional digital cameras — not cell phones — are much easier to use. This is because on many of them (most DLSRs, anyway) you can angle the screen so you do not have to be standing above the document to align it, and it is easier to just click a real button than find the little part on the touch-screen that takes the picture. Obviously these have their own downsides: you need to convert the images to PDFs at a later stage, the camera has a battery that needs to be kept track of (I always have two, so I can charge one while the other is in use), and so on. But my primary aim while I am in the archive is rapid extraction, and so things like converting the JPEGs to PDFs is something I'm happy to do later. (The trick is to just make sure you photograph all of the reference information you need, like the box front and folder name, so you can later reconstruct the folder it is in.)
But yeah. You've identified the difficulty of using a smart phone for this purpose!