Books & Bound Material Digitization

We specialize in rare and delicate books and other bound materials and have developed scanning workflows that minimize handling, while producing very high quality scans. 

This 1833 German homeopathy text belonging to UCSF Special Collections is a good example. The rare book, the author's personal copy, contains his hand-written corrections to the publisher for the next edition.   

Organon Title Page

This book was scanned using one of our DSLR Overhead Capture systems. More information on this project can be found in the Portfolio section.

Another example of our ability to digitize a rare book is a project for the Sierra Club Colby Library. The library owns an album handmade by Ansel Adams in 1928. The album contains photographs from Adam's first High Trip outing with the club, this one to the Canadian Rockies in 1928. The album includes fifty photographic prints, all hand-mounted to custom printed pages sewn into a leather binding. Thirty-four of the photographs are by Adams and they represent his very early work. These images are also a great example of his early photographic printing techniques.

The library wanted a preservation level quality scan for each page of the album, as well as several lower resolution, retouched derivative files for web use. This book is too fragile to fit in an automated scanner, and removing the binding was not an option. That meant devising a custom easel system to hold each photograph exactly flat and parallel to the Betterlight scanner.  It also meant lighting it in such a way to minimize the many surface imperfections and silvering.  

Here is the custom scanning setup we created for this project:

Betterlight Setup for Ansel Adams Book Scanning Project

Photographs were also done to show the open book, like this one:

Ansel Adams open title page

A sample of one of the full page scans from this album can be found in our Portfolio section.

 

Less fragile materials may be scanned with our ATIZ book scanning system designed especially for bound materials. This offers higher productivity and lower cost.

Book Drive Pro

Please call or email to discuss your book scanning projects with us.