Project Gado is developing an inexpensive, open source, autonomous archival scanning robot. The goal? To create a tool that will allow small archives and museums digitize holdings at a low cost and help preserve important documents and pictures. In the process of developing the Gado, the ambitious project is also helping preserve the Afro-American Newspapers photo collection.
Founded in 2010, Project Gado is an effort to create an affordable, open source archival scanning robot for digitizing photographs. The Gado 1, a proof-of-concept machine built on Python and Arduino, scanned more than a thousand photos, and now the project is into Phase 2.