The Gado robot, which costs less than $500, automatically scans archival images and was developed by Johns Hopkins University graduate Thomas Smith and his team, scanned its 100,000th image at the archives of the Baltimore office of the Afro-American newspapers on Monday.
As Technically Baltimore reported, the Afro-American has been using the Gado robot to assist with digitizing more than one million photographs in its archives.
Former Afro archivist John Gartrell had scanned just 5,000 of those photos before he began using the Gado robot. After the robot was delivered to the Afro archives? More than 30,000 photographs were scanned in little time.
Those Afro-American photos are now available on GadoImages.com, for educational, licensing and publishing purposes. The money collected from licensing the site’s high-resolution photographs is circulated back to the Afro to continue the archival work.
Watch the second-generation Gado robot in action at Columbia TechBreakfast last September:
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