Some books, like the Bureau of Land Management publication featured in the video, have myriad fold-outs. Eliza must insert a slip of paper to remind her to go back and shoot each fold-out page, while at the same time inputting the page numbers into the item record. The job requires keen concentration. [...]

Eliza is one of about 70 Scribe operators at the Internet Archive, working in digitization centers embedded in libraries across the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. [...] "We try to meet libraries where they are," said MacLeod, who manages remote operations from her home office in North Carolina. "From digitizing a few shipments a year at one of our regional centers to setting up and staffing full-service digitization within the library itself, we have a flexible approach to our library partnerships."

Across Twitter, another common question arose: "Why hasn't this job been automated?" To many, the repetitive act of turning the pages in a book and photographing them seems like the natural task for a robot. In fact, some 20 years ago, we tested commercial book scanners that feature a vacuum-powered page-turning arm. It turns out those automated scanners didn't really work well for brittle books, rare volumes, and other special collections -- the kinds of material our library partners ask us to digitize.

"Clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages," said Mills, from her socially-distanced office at the University of Toronto. In her 15 years on the job, she has worked with hundreds of librarians to hone our digitization operations, balancing our need to preserve the original pages with minimal impact during the imaging process. "Our goal is to handle the book once and to care for the original as we work with it," Mills explained.

By the way, please note that the Internet Asshole Vats have already overflowed with insights ranging all the way from "Pfff, I could do that with lego" to "lol get a REAL job", and here are a couple of Jason Scott's threads that address these observations: "why u no use robot", "is book scanning job bad?" and more on lego.

The Archive is a treasure, give them your money.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.