This article presents an open source infrastructure for processing large collections of digital books available at the Austrian National Library with a special focus on quality assurance tasks in the context of the European project SCAPE (www.scapeproject-eu). It describes the cluster hardware and the software components used for building the experimental IT infrastructure.More concretely, a set of best practices for the data analysis of large document image collections on the basis of Apache Hadoop will be shown. Different types of Hadoop jobs (Hadoop-Streaming-API, Hadoop MapReduce, and Hive) are used as basic components, and the Taverna workflow description language and execution engine (www.taverna.org.uk) is used for orchestrating complex data processing tasks.