Project Gado is an initiative to build an open source robotic scanner that small archives can use to digitize their photographic collections for less than $500. Project Gado is currently partnered with the archives at the Afro American Newspapers in Baltimore. Project Gado is sponsored by the Abell Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA).
The backbone of the project is the Gado 2, an Arduino-based robot which is able to lift flat materials using suction, place them on a scanner and scan them into a database or computer file system, all autonomously.

