There are a lot of scanning solutions on the market, which scan documents in a myriad of ways. There are the conventional flatbed scanners, portable overhead scanners, portable document feed scanners, portable scanning wands and even small portable cameras that attach to your laptop with an extendable arm to capture content. The advance in scanning technology is undoubtedly beneficial in so many ways and these products offer us so many options in the office, home and digitization labs across the globe.
Flatbed scanners are just one of the pieces of equipment already in use by thousands of cultural heritage institutions worldwide to digitize their collections for preservation or access purposes. However, what about the other scanning solutions on the market? Would these work for creating preservation quality digital surrogates of historical material?
I’m asking this question to
- think about what we offer at CIT as part of our mobile scanning kit and
- explore more broadly what equipment is out there for those that want to create and offer a mobile digitization service.
We’re always open to suggestions for expanding our kit! Please feel free to leave a comment or email us: cultureintransit@metro.org
Our two greatest challenges are ensuring we can provide a digitization service that meets recommended sector standards for digitization and that our kit is mobile – hence weight and size of equipment are important.
Our requirements for a mobile digitization kit.
To recap on our full kit list – that blog post can be found here.
There is a healthy market out there for in-house digitization of cultural heritage material. High-end, high-spec equipment that produces high-end scans – providing both preservation and access copies. This equipment provides an excellent way for many libraries and archives to digitize and provide access to their collections, but is, realistically, out of the price range of the majority of smaller institutions. What we want to try and achieve is a replicable digitization model that is mobile and cost-effective.
However, does the equipment exist to do this? We decided at the project’s outset to create scans that fall in line with accepted sector standards. We create a master preservation copy – a 600dpi TIFF with color chart and from that, a 300dpi JPEG derivative (cropped of the color chart) that is web ready. However, herein lies our greatest challenge when considering equipment for the project – do we scan to sector standards for preservation (which my instinct as an Archivist tells me we should) or do we go with a solution that can provide an easy, access copy but that may not stand the test of time for preservation?
In researching and seeking out alternative solutions that could work for our kit I’ve hit a bit of a brick wall – there are plenty of solutions out there that could easily form part of our mobile digitization kit but nothing quite seems to have all the criteria we’re looking for;
The equipment I’ve looked at:
- FUJITSU Document Scanner ScanSnap SV600
- I was genuinely excited by this product. It is lightweight, there aren’t many parts to it and it seems like a time saver – the scanning looks very quick in the promo video and it has features such as automatic finger removal in post-editing. The only real disadvantage – which is a big one for the project – is it doesn’t scan to TIFF, only JPEG & PDF. This piece of equipment can create easy and fast access copies but not true preservation copies.
- O King scanner (S200)
- Similar to the Fujitsu Scansnap but does have the advantage of scanning to TIFF – bonus point, however it’s maximum resolution is only 1600×1200. I couldn’t find too many reviews online which is always a bad start in my book and those I could find were a few years old. It didn’t look quite as robust as the ScanSnap and the it’s maximum scan size area is limited to A4 compared to A3 with the Fujitsu ScanSnap, which would be very limiting to the project in terms of the types and size of material we can scan.
- A3 scanner
- Again, very similar to the previous two scanners but this scanner’s highest resolution is 2592×1944 pixels – ideally, I wouldn’t want to buy a product that has such a low-limiting resolution and be constrained by this.
- piQx Xcanex portable book and document scanner
- A very innovative design, attaching to a laptop and it’s USB powered so no need for a plug socket. However it’s maximum scan size area is A4 compared to A3 with the Fujitsu ScanSnap and the highest resolution it offers is 300ppi – not nearly enough for the purposes of this project.
The overall sense I get from reading product reviews online for scanners is the prioritization of speed, which comes at the expense of not being able to create a preservation master copy. TIFFs are large files that take time to process. A JPEG or PDF offers a much quicker solution. Or, if TIFF format is an option – the maximum resolution output does not meet the needs of our project.
My takeaway from this research is that aside from the flatbed scanner we already use for the project, companies who make portable scanning equipment do not cater for the cultural heritage digitization industry and those companies that do offer scanning solutions for cultural heritage organizations do not offer mobile and lightweight scanning solutions.
We’ve spent a lot of time researching different pieces of equipment that could work for CIT and definitely feel that there’s a gap in the market. Again, we would really love to hear if anyone out there knows of any pieces of equipment we may have missed! Please leave a comment, email cultureintransit@metro.org or we’re over on Twitter @DigitizeNYC