The open source scanning utility Book Scan Wizard got an update in the past few days, and the update brought a rather interesting feature. You can now use Book Scan Wizard to make a PDF and then upload it to the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive is intended to be an Internet library. It offers permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. It’s collections now include texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages.

One of the things the IA can do is to take a copy of the scanned book uploaded by users and use OCR technology to convert the collection of images to text. If you did this on your own, a good suite of software starts in the hundreds of dollars and goes up from there.

via DIY Book Scanners

image via Flickr