~Excerpted from DigiBook Mag,
June 2005
"As The National Library of
Finland, Helsinki University Library is
responsible for preserving and providing
access to Finnish written cultural heritage.
The Library’s Centre for Preservation and
Digitization started large scale
digitization of newspapers in 2000. As a
result, the Finnish Historical Newspaper
Library was launched in 2001.
http://digi.lib.helsinki.fi
Since then the Centre has
digitized also other groups of the Library’s
collections, for instance maps, scientific
journals and old industry catalogues, to
name a few. To meet the needs of book
digitization projects, two i2S Digibook
10000RGB scanners were purchased in early
2004. During the test period we already
noticed the scanner’s qualities contributing
to overall productivity. Bi-directional
scanning is an advantage in comparison with
many other scanners. The robust and modular
mechanical construction enables us to use
the same base equipment for several
purposes: the black and white and colour
cameras are interchangeable, the scanner can
be used with or without the glass plate.
Non-technical qualities of a
technology purchase can sometimes be a
surprise. As to set-up, installation and
support, i2S have met our expectations very
well. After the installation, two of our
operators attended an in-depth training week
at i2S to be able to fully exploit the
scanners’ capabilities.
So far the Digibook scanners
have been used in several book digitization
projects. In the beginning of this year we
started a larger project comprising 150 000
pages of mainly 19th century Finnish books
and bound volumes of magazines. This
material is now being scanned with the
Digibook scanners and will later be
post-processed and put online for public
access.”
Marko Tenkanen
Senior Systems Analyst