At the American Library Association Annual Conference, which is happening now, Kirtas is unveiling a machine named SkyView. The SkyView 3525 provides an overhead solution for large format materials including fold-out pages in books. To the right is the photo of the machine that Kirtas included in its Summer 2008 newsletter.What I find interesting is that companies, who are already providing equipment, are looking for ways to extend their product lines as well as pull more clients towards them. I see this with many of the equipment companies. For example, a simple machine for doing book digitization might morph into a machine that can be used by patrons in an academic or public library. Or a microfilm reader morphs to include a digitization option. Here Kirtas is applying its technology to solve a different set of problems, with the most obvious being fold-put book pages, however, undoubtedly this machine is capable of much more (and likely you'd have to do more than just fold-out pages in order to justify it.
Kirtas doesn't have any information on its web site about this machine. It will be interesting to read about its full capabilities and perhaps watch a video of it in action. Actually, here is one video they've shot, although the sound doesn't play well for me.
The text with the video states:
Kirtas' new flatbed imaging system captures up to a 35x25 inch aerial view using 21.1 megapixel high-resolution Canon EOS 1DS Mark III digital camera. Moving cameras and a sliding shelf work together to create a perfect image of your important larger documents. With the Kirtas SkyView 3525™, high - quality digitization of maps, newspapers and oversized materials are now a reality.
Technorati tag:
Digitization
5 comments:
This is fun to see, since I helped provide input for improvements to the prototype!
The SkyView appears to be targeting the market currently served by the SupraScan A1 II.
http://www.i2s-digibook.com/produits.asp?gamme=1017&sX_Menu_selectedID=leftV_1017_GEN
The major difference seems to be the SkyView taking multiple images and stitching in software, whereas the SupraScan takes a single image. The use of a Canon consumer digital camera with a bayer filter is not ideal for reference image quality.
Also the SupraScan can be used with an optional book cradle and glass, allowing you to do bound and unbound documents with the one device. The SkyView doesn't seem to have anything that will hold a bound book open on the scanning table.
Will be interesting to see the price.
An article from the National Library of Norway regarding their digitization efforts and SupraScan/DigiBook scanners.
One of their interesting findings was that it was 10 times more efficient to cut the bindings and sheetfeed the pages, in terms of productivity vs labor cost, which they did when they had 3 or more copies of a volume.
They have decided on JPEG2000 as a compression standard for the preservation copy.
The link:
http://www.nb.no/content/download/2326/18198/version/1/file/digitizing-books_sep07.pdf
Here is the offical SkyView 3525 site: http://www.kirtas.com/skyview.html
There is also a new video with working sound. http://www.kirtas.com/videos.html (half way down on the page)
-Kirtas Webmaster
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