Scanners

Stephen Selby seeks information about scanning thread-bound Chinese
books without braking the spine.

We, at the University Library of Graz, Austria, are digitizing our
tight-bound manuscripts using a special  equipment, which I
developed and built by myself. This equipment allows filming or
digitizing manuscripts with nearly no stress for the binding. The
Object lies on a book-cradle with an opening angle of approx. 150
degrees. Contact-free Digitization is done by a Nikon-camera with a
Kodak-chip instead of the film. The occasional digitized page is
lifted a little bit from the text block by hand and is then laid
only at the edge on a thing we call "suction-arm". Now a very
moderate air flow  keeps the sheet in place and nearly flat. The
point is (in my opinion), that the camera is mounted on a special
mechanic in such a sophisticated way, that the digitization can be
done with a minimum of distortion--regardless of the exact position
of the "lifted" sheet.

I hope that my (maybe a little awkward) description of our technology
will help the colleagues in Shanghai. For the moment this equipment is
only a prototype, but works very well since one year.

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 11:51
                 Distributed: Tuesday, December 9, 1997
                       Message Id: cdl-11-51-005
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