By Kendall Hallberg
One of Digital Collections’ state-of-the-art scanners, that you may remember, is the planetary scanner known as the Zeutschel (or more affectionately “the Z”). We’ve used it to scan all sorts of oversized materials like the Piranesi Volumes and even a quilt. Now, we’re using it to scan a whole bunch all at once.
With the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Digitizing Hidden Collections Grant, Digital Collections is working with the South Caroliniana Library to digitize the South Carolina Council on Human Relations Papers. This project stretches about 35 linear feet which is about the same number of boxes. The Z makes it possible for use to scan through this massive project 8 folders at a time. You can see in the diagram how we fit all 8 folders onto the scanner. To explain how this works, the program (Omnipage) we use with the scanner allows us to split the bed into 8 virtual beds attached to one scan head that creates and sorts the files separately.
Please click on ‘download this file’ in the above media player to play the video.
The work that the program does significantly decreases the work that we manually do with the smaller flatbed scanners at our desks. Streamlined file naming, almost no image post-processing – like straightening and cropping, and perfectly sorted, high-quality TIFFS (the archival best practice for preservation) and JPEGS (the ones we use for our repository), all done automatically. And it all happens relatively quickly! Though not as quickly as the time-lapse presents it – I am not super-human, unfortunately.
