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Book Scanning Robots

Michael Keller, head librarian at Stanford demonstrated the application of a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport utility vehicle that rapidly turns the pages of a book and scans the text at speeds of more than 1,000 pages an hour.

The first book-scanning robots were introduced in 2003 by 4DigitalBooks of St. Aubin, Switzerland, and Kirtas Technologies of Victor, New York. Until now, the job has been done mostly by students or armies of low-cost workers in countries like India and the Philippines. But manual digitisation presents significant
logistical problems. Book collections may have to be moved long distances to digitisation centers. And in some cases the process of scanning has damaged old books and journals, making it necessary to rebind them afterward.

Currently in India or the Philippines it is possible to scan and digitize a book for $1 to $4. But there are significant costs in quality control. The digitising machines, by contrast, can be located close to book collections and offer speed and quality control unattainable by manual systems.

Despite this, at present times, manual processing is still less expensive in many cases than acquiring a robot. The 4DigitalBooks robot becomes cost effective on projects larger than 5.5 million pages.

Among the projects undertaken for manual scanning by the Stanford library system is in a University in Europe to digitise selected documents produced by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor organisation, the World Trade organisation in Geneva. The project, which will take five years, will ultimately scan about 2.2 million pages of information.

Other ambitious undertakings like Carnegie Mellon University's Million Book Project will also continue to rely on manual digitisation for several more years. Another project, led by the Internet Archive in San Francisco, recently shipped 80 tons of old books acquired from the Kansas City Library to Hyderabad, India, where they will be scanned.

The challenges are neither labour costs nor technology but copyright restrictions.
Stanford is struggling to comply with copyright restrictions while making works that have recently lost their copyright protection available digitally. Apparently, the Stanford library increased the circulation of its collection by 50 percent when it computerized its card catalog. Digitising out-of-print books could likewise make them available to a much wider audience. The payoff for building such a digital collection is vastly improved availability of a huge store of knowledge and information for teaching, learning and research.

Source: The Evelyn Wood of Digitized Book Scanners

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