This robot scans rare library books at 2,500 pages per hour
For decades, the conservatives responsible for scanning rare books have been faced with an ironic challenge. The interest of digitizing these often unique objects in its kind is to keep the delicate manuscripts of damage. To do this, however, required a much more practical approach.
One of the first solutions was to simply place a volume in a book cradle, then photograph each individual page. In recent years, archivists have been more and more relied on more advanced down and down documents of documents. Even today, the digitization process is often tedious and long work – and this is where specially designed robots are useful.
After two years of research, archivists of the McFarlin library from the University of Tulsa have recently decided to try a machine called Treventus Scanrobot 2.0. Built in Austria, the bot does exactly what its name implies – it scans and independently digitizes the manuscripts. But while he can take a single librarian or weeks to scan a single book, the Scanrobot 2.0 can manage up to 2,500 per hour. However, this does not sacrifice safety for speed. The configuration is based on a unique toolbox to ensure that it quickly digitizes a book, but with the least direct contact as possible.
First of all, a camera housed in a corner -shaped box descends into the central margin of a book, also known as the gutter. Small holes in the triangular plate, then generate a vacuum to slowly pull the pages on each side of the prism of the camera. The imaging unit then rises again while scanning the two pages simultaneously. Once finished, the void is died out and the air nozzles emit a little breath of fresh air to turn the pages. The entire process is then repeated again and again, until a book is finished.
But the purchase of a scanrobot 2.0 does not mean that the librarians can simply return it and leave the room. The director of the library department and the rare book cataloger formed for a week to become certified book robot operators. One of them is always in the control panel each time the robot is used to monitor its progress, adjust the parameters in real time or suspend its work.
“Our assessments show that around 64,000 of our books are outside copyright and could be scanned and uploaded, and more books join the public domain each year,” Kunz said in a university profile earlier this year. “There will always be books to make available for our students and academics.”
More offers, reviews and purchasing guides
