English

Etymology

From scan +‎ -athon.

Noun

scanathon (plural scanathons)

  1. An event at which people digitize a large amount of archival material.
    • 2017, “The Scanathon connection”, in The Forest Park Review‎[1], archived from the original on 1 August 2025:
      A Scanathon is an event the purpose of which is to preserve family photos by scanning them.
    • 2018, Eirini Goudarouli, “Testing new ‘digitisation on demand’ tools”, in The National Archives‎[2], archived from the original on 18 May 2022:
      The purpose of the scanathon was to test new archival tools for ‘digitisation on demand’ developed as part of the READ project (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents), funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
    • 2020, Samuel Burgum, “This City Is An Archive: Squatting History and Urban Authority”, in Journal of Urban History‎[3], archived from the original on 31 March 2022, page 7:
      Recently, 56a have attempted to address this through “scanathon” events to digitize and preserve the collection online, as well as building relationships with more formal institutions such as the MayDay Rooms, who describe themselves as an “active repository, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories.”
source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scanathon