Comments on: Using Camera Phones to Improve Reference in the Archives and Library

By: Megan Fraser

Megan Fraser — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:47:20 +0000

I think you mean “vault/cage/lehr.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lew_Lehr

By: matt

matt — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:10:40 +0000

Christine and Jim, one of the things I like best about the sendable-photo approach is that I can do it “where the stuff is,” whether in book stacks, in the vault/cage/lair, or in the basement storage room with oversize ledgers. No photocopier or scanner needed…which brings me to my second point: For whatever reason, I tend to find that I’m taking quick and dirty snapshots of material that is either oversize or more fragile than I want to put on the flatbed of a photocopier or scanner. This is probably why, in my lower-priority daydreams, I have a sweet overhead book-type scanner that automatically compiles a PDF like Jim’s photocopier does — but this runs afoul of the “where the stuff is” benefit.

Having said all this, if anyone has an extra PDF-networkable photocopier or overhead scanner, I’d swallow my pride and accept it.

By: Jim G.

Jim G. — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:07:44 +0000

We do very little photocopying at all anymore – much quicker and easier to send scans, especially since we got a copier that sends PDFs directly to our network account from which we can attach to an email. Has saved us tons of time over the past year. We have taken digital photos of a few items that were too large for our copier or scanners, but none of us have decent phones so we’ve borrowed the library digital camera in those cases. But if someone here had a better phone device, I could definitely see the value of taking “phone photos” to quickly and easily share information with interested patrons.

By: Christine Di Bella

Christine Di Bella — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:27:33 +0000

Coincidentally, I actually did this today – my new reading room doesn’t have its own large format scanner, and the piece was too big for a standard one, and I made the calculation that a crude iPhone photo would do the trick in this case. (Not wanting to leave my comfy post or prevail upon my assistant for the umpteenth time today may have also had something to do with it.)

I’ve emailed myself such photos that went into a grant application before, but this is the first time I did it for reference. I liked it.

By the way, we don’t have a photocopier yet either (it’s down the hall, in the main part of the library), but we do have a little letter size scanner attached to one of the public computers, so we often do quick and dirty scans where others would do photocopies. I did this today too, and printed them out for the researcher, though we often just email them.

By: matt

matt — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:32:35 +0000

Hey Jordon. We do not charge for this service. Prior to switching the approach to take camera phone snapshots, I would have taken 5-30 minutes to identify pertinent resources and jot down descriptions and citations to share with the researcher, including a note like “let me know if you are interested in visiting to use these resources or would like to obtain images.”

I still consider this 5-30 minutes of baseline resource identification to be a free estimate. The quickie snapshots are just a part of that now. If I already know what resources will help a researcher or I don’t feel that images will be especially helpful, I just reply with a description of resources and no photos.

These types of reference requests usually involve taking 1-5 snapshots. If I ended up taking more than perhaps 8 snapshots, I would consider charging a fee. If I ended up doing this a lot, I would build a separate fee structure around staff-provided reference snapshots — this would be a lower fee than our existing imaging fees for high-quality scans and photos.

The image at the top of the post (if you click to blow it up to the full size) is what I sent to the researcher. Good image quality is not the goal — if it is legible, that is enough for my purposes. The researcher can always come back for a better image. So even a crappy camera would work for most images. For one of the resources I sent to this particular researcher, I took snapshots of the top and the bottom of the page since the legibility was poor — not surprising since it was on the screen of a dim-bulbed microfilm reader.

By: jordon

jordon — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:50:04 +0000

“At least a 70% of our in-house researchers simply take reference snapshots of materials rather than making photocopies or requesting scans. I decided that if it was OK for them, it was OK for me to give to them.”

I like this logic. Do you still charge them for the digital images? More or less or the same than if you did it on a normal scanner?

I think this would only work on phones with good cameras. I’ve got a Crackberry Curve, and the camera is terrible. Too grainy.