What is Captua?

Captua turns a Raspberry Pi computer and two cameras into a station for photographing archival volumes, one pair of pages at a time. Captua works with three camera options: cameras controlled through gphoto2, Canon compact cameras running CHDK, and Arducam IMX519 camera modules connected directly to the Raspberry Pi. Through a web interface in Spanish or English, an operator captures each pair, describes the volume, and exports the images. The station works without an internet connection. Captua is open-source software, released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.

Captua is the software of the Digitization Toolkit: hardware, software, and documentation with which institutions, collectives, and communities with few resources can digitize their archival collections at low cost. The Toolkit is developed at the Archives, Memory, and Preservation Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Texas at Austin, building on years of community-based digitization in the Global South by the Colombian non-profit Neogranadina.

Captua works on its own or as the first step in a workflow for digitizing, cataloging, and publishing archival collections. Capture images in Captua, catalog and review the material in Fisqua, and publish it as a searchable digital archive with Zasqua.