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Old printed documents are considered documents, published since moment of the invention of the
printing process in the middle of the XV century till the beginning of the XIX century.
Because of their antiquity, such
documents are usually in a bad physical state and low mechanical toughness of the paper.
Besides, in process of long-term use many documents have lost some of their parts, as well as were
subjected to the destructive influence of mildew, fungus, insect etc. In view of the aforesaid
and considering great value of such documents, the scanning department was founded for making
digital copies of the old printed documents. The objectives of the scanning department are both
scanning old printed documents and developing efficient technologies of scanning old printed
documents.
Unlike technology of scanning modern documents, in order to develop an efficient technology of
scanning old printed documents it is necessary to take into account all the particularities of
dealing with such documents. One of the the most important problems is safety provision
of old printed documents in every respect. The other factor is the necessity of ensuring high
scanning quality to enable the researcher to address to the original as rarely as possible.
The third factor is the need of reliable storage preservation of the digital copies of
old printed documents,
as well as establishing a suitable mechanism of the presentation this documents to the user.
Under safety of old printed documents follows to understand both measures on prevention of the theft this documents and measures on provision on their state and appearance preservation in the process of scanning. For prevention of theft of the documents, the scanning department occupies a separate room, equipped with safety and fire alarm with installed fireproof safe with electronic-mechanical lock. Moreover, special procedure was designed for the delivery of old printed documents from library stock to the scanning site. When sending the documents for scanning, the librarian records the current state and when returning the documents, their state is checked again for invariability. The staff of the scanning department passes the special training in rare books division of the Library about handling old printed documents and the staff always works under rigid control of this division. Safety of old printed documents during scanning is provided by specialized colour book scanner BookEye Color A2, which allows scanning the documents without their full opening. In order to illuminate the object of the scan, BookEye scanner uses the UV- and IR-radiation free fluorescent lamp, which does not influence the state of the old printed documents paper. For complete technical features of the BookEye scanner please visit www.imageaccess.com. BSCAN ver. 5.0. software was used for processing scan results. This software was adjusted to secure the optimum, speediest scanning process, using specially developed script based on powerful built-in BSCAN script support language. All works related to software installation, customization and training scanner operators have been conducted by UniNET specialists. High scanning quality was provided by both special scanning staff training and format of result saving, for which TIFF format is used. All of the scanned information is saved in graphic format only. Conversion to the text equivalent is impossible because of the absence of efficient software on the automatic recognition of the ancient European languages. Though, when subsequently such software on the automatic recognition appears, converting the graphic information into the text format can be easily realized. Reliability of storing digital copies of old printed documents is provided by large capacity storage server based on RAID-array level 50. At present RAID-array accumulates 2 Tb size and has extension possibility. In addition to saving scan results in TIFF format, they are also saved in JPG format, which is used for page preview of the old printed documents on this site. This allows vastly reducing user traffic when searching for an interesting document. All in all, the site was designed with the purpose of granting the user the fullest and most suitable access to obtaining digital copies of old printed documents available in funds of the Maksymovych Scientific Library of Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University. | ||||||||
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