New Device Can Digitize Up to 1,200 Book Pages per Hour
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.1.16
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i19/19a03402.htm

By SCOTT CARLSON

Those who attend the American Library Association's midwinter
conference this month will see a curious machine -- a lecternlike
bookstand with robot arms that pass vacuum wands over the pages.
It is a new device that automatically digitizes entire books -- up to
1,200 pages an hour -- with little help from a human operator.
Lofti Belkhir, the CEO of Kirtas Technologies, which manufactures the
book scanner, says colleges will be among the main targets of his
marketing campaign this year. The Kirtas book scanner is not cheap
-- it runs about $150,000 -- but Mr. Belkhir will try to persuade
librarians with big digitization projects that hiring a service or a
librarian to scan books costs more. He says his company will offer to
digitize some books for libraries to promote the machine and show off
its digitization capabilities.
His machine also got a bump from the magazine Popular Science, which
highlighted the Kirtas book scanner in its "Best of What's New 2003"
issue.
Over the past few years, digitization has become an important mission
at many college and university libraries. Because of the costs of
digitization, most libraries are digitizing only their unique, most
important, or rare items and offering them on the Internet. Smaller
libraries are accomplishing this digitization in-house and by hand
-- page by page with a personal computer and a flatbed scanner.
The Automatic Method
Last year Stanford bought a large scanning machine manufactured by a
Swiss company called 4DigitalBooks. The machine, which is more
expensive than Kirtas's but can handle volumes larger in size, is
being used to digitize 2,500 titles in the Stanford University Press
catalog.
When the Kirtas machine is running, a book sits open on a V-shaped
bed, and a camera sits over the pages, transforming them into
black-and-white or color digital images. The machine automatically
adjusts the book's height to the camera's field of focus. A robot
wand, armed with a vacuum suction, turns the pages. It can handle
anything from onionskin pages to the thick pages of art books. Other
robot components, armed with clamps, flatten the pages to ensure a
clear, straight image.
"This was designed from the ground up to handle very fragile books,"
Mr. Belkhir says. "We pick up the page in the inside, away from the
brittle edges, so in that sense we are more gentle than the human
hand. A human has no choice but to pick up a page from its corner or
edge."
Book-digitizing machines are new devices, and it is difficult to
forecast whether they will be used widely. Daniel Greenstein, the
director of the California Digital Library, says that such
book-digitization machines may be a way for libraries to protect
fragile volumes, offer collections to a wider audience, and save
space.
As for whether the machines will be purchased by many libraries across
the country, much depends on the costs of the machines versus the
costs of storage space or a digitization service, he says.
Because most institutions are digitizing a limited amount of material
on a one-time basis, a digitization machine is probably better owned
by a company or consortium that could provide inexpensive digitization
service to libraries and publishers.
"You would think that there is a business opportunity for a company,"
he says. "If there were companies out there that could provide high
volume at a low cost, we could be a client. You could use a tool like
that to pool demand."