As part of our winter holiday activities, our family has been busily clearing out the basement to set up a play area for the kids. In doing so, we created a stack of old electronics — monitors, printers, stereo receivers, and such — that are of questionable working condition and worth. In looking around the web, I found the list of e-waste disposal locations on the SWACO website. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell which one was the closest because it was in a static list. So with a little spare time I put them on a map to help me find the nearest location; hopefully it will help you find the nearest location as well.

View Larger Map

If you know of any other locations, please add them in the comments and I’ll update the map.

Updates

The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) might also of interest here in Ohio. OhioLINK is building a repository of recent current-year books that we license from publishers. One wonders, with the addition of an add-on license fee to the copyright owners, whether we could use such a machine to print on-demand books from current titles. On Demand Books is obviously thinking along the same lines; in April they entered into a partnership with Lightning Source Industries, which enables the EBM to print from Lightning Source’s catalogue of over 500,000 in-copyright books. The EBM can also access nearly 400,000 public domain books through their relationship with the Open Content Alliance.

So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the technical specifications of the EBM.

About the Espresso Book Machine

The EBM will print bind and trim a 300 page book in about 7 minutes with a one printer model and in about 3 minutes with a two printer model. Production cost is a penny a page. Consumables used by the EBM are paper, cover stock and toner suitable for laser printers, glue and charcoal filters. The first three are commonly available consumables. The glue for binding will cost less than $100 and can be used for roughly 10,000 books. The charcoal filter is replaced about once a month and costs about $1.

The trim size of a book is infinitely variable between 8.5” by 11” and 4.5” x 4.5” and the EBM version 1.5 can bind up to 550 pages. The shearing blade has to be sharpened about every 5,000 – 10,000 books; sharpening by manufacturer is recommended.

The file formats accepted are the exact same files as one would use in traditional book printing: a PDF for the book block and (ideally) a PDF for the cover. The machine will print (and then bind and trim) anything a laser printer can print. The software on the machine itself does not combine individual files into a single book; it must be “pre-made” before being delivered to the Espresso machine.

How the machine actually behaves is a bit unclear to me. The publicity says that all interaction with the machine is performed via a standard browser. The decision of how broadly to expose that interface (local network only, campus-wide, internet-wide, etc.) is reportedly up to the owner of the EBM. It is also unclear as to how the content repository works. The promotional materials speak of a world-wide content repository for Espresso machines and that content can be restricted to a particular location, but then it also goes on to say that a site can manage its own content repository or that the manufacturer of the machine can do that function for an added fee. If I learn more, I’ll update this post. If anyone knows anything about how the content repository works, please comment or get in touch with me privately.

Wired magazine published a brief story and online photo gallery of the book scanning and print-on-demand projects at the Internet Archive. It is a fascinating glimpse into their vision and processes. Included below are cropped thumbnails and part of the text captions that accompanied the pictures in the Wired online gallery.

	The book to be scanned sits in front of a technician underneath a V-shaped glass platter. Two opposing cameras angled at each page take photos of the book. On screen is the multipage view that the operator uses to verify the quality of the scans and the book’s pagination.
	Scanning books into the Internet Archive’s custom-built Scribe Station is a manual process. Although automated page-turning machines exist, Internet Archive has chosen to go the manual route due to the large amount of extremely delicate, rare and valuable manuscripts they scan.
	The book scanner uses off-the-shelf Canon hardware including the EOS 1-Ds Mark II and the EF 100 mm f/2.8 macro lens. The newer systems use the 5-D instead of the 1-Ds, which saves money in the short term. But, according to Internet Archive staff, the 5-D fails much more frequently, resulting in increased maintenance costs.
	At the start of every shift the operator calibrates the color levels using a pair of color-calibration cards. When the scanning project first started, Internet Archive attempted to color correct the scanned pages to white, but later decided to capture and store them as they are in their various aged shades of yellow. Preservation of the oxidized tints makes the virtual viewing of old books more lifelike.
	At the turn of the last century, fold-out illustrations were all the rage. These foldouts are cool to look at, but present a problem for scanning due to their size. When an operator comes across one of these foldouts in a book, they scan the closed version and note the foldout in the Scribe software. Later, another scanner is used consisting of a camera mounted on a copy stand.
	Soon, you’ll be able to print books found at the Internet Archive with this self-contained, fully automated book machine. Send it a PDF and it will print and bind it into a complete book. The process takes about 10 minutes depending on the size of the book, and costs $10 plus a penny per page.
	Inside the book machine, the laser-printed pages are trimmed, then slathered with adhesive on what will become the book’s spine. The cover is then wrapped around the book. After another trim, out pops a custom-printed book ready for reading.
	Instead of stacks of books, these archival volumes are now contained in racks of 160 terabyte boxes. Multiple redundant copies of the archive’s data are spread across servers all over the world.
	Before entering the world of public-domain-promoting nonprofits, Robert Miller spent the last few decades at the top levels of various brick-and-mortar tech corporations. He is currently the director of books at the Internet Archive, and it’s his vision that drives the archive’s quest to digitize all public-domain knowledge and publish it online.

I love my local public library system, the Columbus Metropolitan Library. I’m a big fan of its helpful staff, plentiful collections, and convenient delivery service. Today I appaud it for coming up with what I think is the best terminology for our patrons to understand what we mean when we say databases. In a box on their homepage with the heading “Beyond Google” the CML says “Your library card is all you need to access our premium online resources!” What a great phrase for those things — premium online resources. By using the word “premium,” this phrase points out the notion that these are things with added value. That added value may come from the fact that the resources are licensed and are therefore beyond what you would get just looking at the open web. Or it could mean that it is a curated collection created and offered to the open web by the library itself. Some may waver over the use of the word “resources” but I think that is a meaningful phrase

To really see this phrase in action, though, take a look at how it appears in their metasearch form. There are two radio buttons — one for the “catalog” (which is also a link to their home-grown ILS) and one for “premium resources” (which links to an alphabetical list of databases). With the heading “Find It” and its positioning in the upper left corner of every page, this search form really gets to the heart of the information discovery in today’s libraries.

Way to go, CML!