We’re written about a few of our digitization techniques from the context scanner to flatbed scanning, but now it’s time to get into the hard stuff- that’s right I’m talking about the fancy book scanners.

These book scanners, known as ATIZ (pronounced A-tease) workstations, are used from imaging rare books –ones we can’t chop into pieces.

Like these beautiful books from the Langmann collection!

The workstations are made of a frame with two Canon 5D Mark II cameras. There is also a book cradle to support the books.

This is the right hand side camera

The book cradle is covered in green paper to make it easier to edit out of the picture

After turning on the ATIZ machine, the lights, and the computer software program we use to take the pictures called VMWare Fusion, we turn on the cameras. To focus the cameras we use an attachment that projects a laser onto the page of the cradle for a short time. The cameras are able to lock in on the laser, using it to focus correctly on the page.

Can you see the faint line here?

The book to be scanned is placed in the book cradle. A glass plate is lowered on top of the pages to smooth and flatten them. The plate is attached to a spring to adjust to the book height.

Then the cameras, remember there is one for each page(!) must be selected and adjusted to take the images in the proper order. It’s easy to check the image is perfect on the Live View on the attached computer.

A red laser makes it easy to center the book on a center gridline.There is a keypad the scanner can use to get the cameras to shoot in sequential order, shoot the right hand or the left hand page. For each page the glass plate is lifted, the page is turned, and the process is repeated!

At DI we’ve scanned around 10,000 books over the past 5 years this way!

Digitization is no joke, it’s  ! Badum tish!