Those who attend the American Library Association's midwinter conference this month will see a curious machine -- a lecternlike bookstand with robot arms that pass vacuum wands over the pages. It is a new device that automatically digitizes entire books - up to 1,200 pages an hour -- with little help from a human operator.

Lofti Belkhir, the CEO of Kirtas Technologies, which manufactures the book scanner, says colleges will be among the main targets of his marketing campaign this year. The Kirtas book scanner is not cheap -- it runs about $150,000 -- but Mr. Belkhir will try to persuade librarians with big digitization projects that hiring a service or a librarian to scan books costs more. He says his company will offer to digitize some books for libraries to promote the machine and show off its digitization capabilities.

His machine also got a bump from the magazine Popular Science, which highlighted the Kirtas book scanner in its "Best of What's New 2003" issue. Over the past few years, digitization has become an important mission at many college and university libraries. Because of the costs of digitization, most libraries are digitizing only their unique, most important, or rare items and offering them on the Internet. Smaller libraries are accomplishing this digitization in-house and by hand -- page by page with a personal computer and a flatbed scanner.

The Automatic Method

Last year Stanford bought a large scanning machine manufactured by a Swiss company called 4DigitalBooks. The machine, which is more expensive than Kirtas's but can handle volumes larger in size, is being used to digitize 2,500 titles in the Stanford University Press catalog.

When the Kirtas machine is running, a book sits open on a V-shaped bed, and a camera sits over the pages, transforming them into black-and-white or color digital images. The machine automatically adjusts the book's height to the camera's field of focus. A robot wand, armed with a vacuum suction, turns the pages. It can handle anything from onionskin pages to the thick pages of art books. Other robot components, armed with clamps, flatten the pages to ensure a clear, straight image.

"This was designed from the ground up to handle very fragile books," Mr. Belkhir says. "We pick up the page in the inside, away from the brittle edges, so in that sense we are more gentle than the human hand. A human has no choice but to pick up a page from its corner or edge."

Book-digitizing machines are new devices, and it is difficult to forecast whether they will be used widely. Daniel Greenstein, the director of the California Digital Library, says that such book-digitization machines may be a way for libraries to protect fragile volumes, offer collections to a wider audience, and save space. As for whether the machines will be purchased by many libraries across the country, much depends on the costs of the machines versus the costs of storage space or a digitization service, he says.

Because most institutions are digitizing a limited amount of material on a one-time basis, a digitization machine is probably better owned by a company or consortium that could provide inexpensive digitization service to libraries and publishers.
"You would think that there is a business opportunity for a company," he says. "If there were companies out there that could provide high volume at a low cost, we could be a client. You could use a tool like that to pool demand."

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