One of the issues I find in libraries and archives is keeping the, book or papers in the right position for reading. In some places, like the British Library, they supply foam wedges and those covered strings of weights for you to use, however they are quite bulky. Also a lot of other places do not supply anything, so I was on the lookout for an alternative which I could carry about with me. There are commercial alternatives, yet these are quite expensive and often quite bulky. See Display Supports - Preservation Equipment Ltd or Clarkson Book Supports.

So I was really pleased to find this portable book stand which you can make yourself. It was created by Elizabeth Rideout and you can find the details on this blog page: Collapsible Book Cradle | Blue Roof Designs

Now one of my hobbies is bookbinding and so I found this quite easy to make, but I reckon any decent crafter could make one too. The materials might be a bit of a struggle, however I bought mine from Shepherds Bookbinding Supplies but it is basically heavy cardboard, with a water resistant fabric glued onto it, so you could cobble together these materials from scrap items.

The Rideout Cradle using the original measurements comes out quite large and the second issue is that I had to convert the sizes a little, to account for differences in US and European paper sizes. So, I made a second, much smaller one based on A4 boards, and covered in black so that when it is folded up, it is the size of one sheet of A4. This is pretty much ideal for carrying about with you and taking into a library. My second modification was to build an extra little 30 mm high platform to use in photographing books that folds flat and attached to the stand base.

Folded flat for transport, the book stand is A4 in size and 20 mm deep

We have all been there, arriving at the library to copy that crucial book section, only to find the photocopier is broken or the queue for the scanners is round the block. I used to carry a little compact camera with me, as allowed by the British Library, but I found a couple of problems with this. Firstly keeping a book flat and open, required at least one finger and several book weights, and repositioning them made photographing each page rather slow. Secondly with the book flat open on the desk, the overhead lighting never worked and I got heavy shadows projected by my body onto the page. I tried to eliminate these with the colour adjustment setting on the camera but they always showed through and gave the pages a yellow hue or tint. Then I always got one or two pages that were out of focus, due to changing position between each shot to turn the page, and because I took the shot too early before the auto-focus had completed. I had the same sorts of problems when taking the images on a smart-phone, which was made worse by the fact that the focal length was longer, and so I needed to position the phone higher. At least the camera worked at a focal length that was about the same length as my arms, so that I could lean on the desk and snap away. Yet one or two shots got spoiled due to camera shake as I pressed the button and moved slightly, so between these issues I was losing around 10% of my images as either blurred or unreadable. I could get round these problems in libraries/archives that allowed camera stands but these are few and far between.

Book stand being used for tablet photography

In search to an answer to this problem, I consulted Twitter and found that some people were using an i-Pad Pro to take their images as the camera was very good and the software on the tablet allowed it to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and convert a batch of images into PDFs automatically. I use the Microsoft Surface Go as it uses the Windows 10 operating system and so integrates with my laptop. What's great about it is that it has a little kickstand and it's camera (or Office Lens app) has automatic 'de-skewing' functions. It has all those software advantages, saving to the cloud, converting to PDF, saving to an SD Card for easy transfer when you get home and renaming files and positioning in the right folder between different jobs.

This view shows the advantage of using a small 30 mm high stand to raise the tablet up higher and yet keep it stable

Combining the Surface tablet with the Book Stand, means removing one support and turning the other one round so that it provides support at near to 80 or 90 degrees rather than at 30-40 degrees. Now place the book on the stand base and open it so that the page in question is resting vertically on its side against the stand support. Then position the 30mm high platform on the book stand base a convenient distance from the book. The reason for using this, is that when the tablet sits on its kickstand the camera points slightly downwards, so raising it up by 30 mm means that it now has the upright page of the book in the centre of the camera.

Note that the rake of the book matches that of the tablet

Image taken with a compact digital camera, note how the right hand side is out of focus and the bottom of both pages are covered with shadows

Using this set up has solved a number of problems associated with cameras and smart-phones:

The book is properly supported and only opened to 90 degrees rather than being placed flat. This works far better when shooting paperbacks with a glued spine
The problem of shadows is eliminated as the page to be photographed is standing vertically and so only gets ambient light, not direct light from above
Problems of camera shake, changing focal length and repositioning are all eliminated because this is a fixed, stable set up
There is one hand free to turn and hold the pages open and the other hand can use a button or mouse to take the photograph
It guarantees 100% success in photographing pages from a book chapter or archival documents, and in addition you can set the camera to take high quality images which is useful for OCR. I reckon that it takes only 2 or 3 second per page which translates into 1,000 pages an hour or three books an hour, even allowing time for repositioning books and swapping between titles.

Photograph taken by the camera on a Surface Go tablet using the book stand, and the camera automatically crops and de-skews the image.

With a set of verso and recto page images, I used a neat feature of the Abbyy FineReader programme to rotate the images and reorder the book back into the correct page sequence. I tend to do each chapter as a separate folder to keep the number of images in any one folder to a reasonable number when re-ordering the pages.

If anyone has any other helpful tips about working with documents, I would appreciate them in the comments box below: