Book scanning

There are many collaborative digitization projects throughout the United States. Two of the earliest projects were the Collaborative Digitization Project in Colorado and NC ECHO – North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online,[3] based at the State Library of North Carolina.

These projects establish and publish best practices for digitization and work with regional partners to digitize cultural heritage materials. Additional criteria for best practices have more recently been established in the UK, Australia and the European Union.[4] Wisconsin Heritage Online[5] is a collaborative digitization project modeled after the Colorado Collaborative Digitization Project. Wisconsin uses a wiki[6] to build and distribute collaborative documentation. Georgia's collaborative digitization program, the Digital Library of Georgia,[7] presents a seamless virtual library on the state's history and life, including more than a hundred digital collections from 60 institutions and 100 agencies of government. The Digital Library of Georgia is a GALILEO[8] initiative based at the University of Georgia Libraries.

In the twentieth century, the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library photographed books in Ethiopia that were subsequently destroyed amidst political violence in 1975. The library has since worked to photograph manuscripts in Middle Eastern countries.[9]

In South-Asia, the Nanakshahi trust is digitizing manuscripts of Gurmukhīscript.

In Australia, there have been many collaborative projects between the National Library of Australia and universities to improve the repository infrastructure that digitized information would be stored in.[10] Some of these projects include, the ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) project and the APSR (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repository) project.

More precise and less destructive than cutting pages with a paper guillotine or razor or scissors is the technique of meticulous unbinding by hand, assisted with tools. This technique has been successfully employed for tens of thousands of pages of archival original paper scanned for the Riazanov Library digital archive project from newspapers and magazines and pamphlets, varying from 50 to 100 years old and more, and often composed of fragile, brittle paper. Although the monetary value for some collectors (and for most sellers of this sort of material) is destroyed by unbinding, unbinding in many cases actually greatly assists preservation of the physical pages themselves, making them more accessible to researchers and less likely to be damaged when subsequently examined. The down side is that unbound stacks of pages are "fluffed up", and therefore more exposed to oxygen in the air, which may in some cases (theoretically) speed deterioration. This can be addressed by putting weights on the pages after they are unbound, and storage in appropriate containers.

Hand unbinding will preserve text that runs into the gutters of bindings, and most critically allows more easy and complete high quality scans to be made of two page wide material, such as center cartoons, graphic art, and photos in magazines. The digital archive of The Liberator 1918-1924 on Marxist Internet Archive nicely demonstrates the quality of two page wide graphic art scans made possible by careful hand unbinding prior to flat bed or other scanning.

Unbinding techniques vary with the binding technology, from simply removing a few staples to unbending and removing nails to meticulously grinding down of layers of glue on the spine of a book to precisely the right point, followed by laborious removal of the string used to hold the book together.

Note that with some newspapers (such as Labor Action 1950-1952) there are columns on the center facing pages that run right in-between the pages. Chopping off part of the spine of a bound volume of such papers will lose part of this text. Even the Greenwood Reprint of this publication failed to preserve the text content of those center columns, cutting off significant amounts of text there. Only when bound volumes of the original newspaper were meticulously unbound, and the opened pair of center pages were scanned as a single page on a flat bed scanner was the center column content made digitally available. Alternatively, one can present the two facing center pages as three scans. One of each individual page, and one of a page sized area situated over the center of the two pages.

One method of cutting a stack of 500 to 1000 pages in one pass is accomplished with a guillotine paper cutter. This is a large steel table with a paper vise that screws down onto the stack and firmly secures it before cutting. The cut is accomplished with a large sharpened steel blade which moves straight down and cuts the entire length of each sheet all at once. A lever on the blade permits several hundred pounds of force to be applied to the blade for a quick one-pass cut.

A clean cut through a thick stack of paper cannot be made with a traditional inexpensive sickle-shaped hinged paper cutter. These cutters are only intended for a few sheets, with up to ten sheets being the practical cutting limit. A large stack of paper applies torsional forces on the hinge, pulling the blade away from the cutting edge on the table. The cut becomes more inaccurate as the cut moves away from the hinge, and the force required to hold the blade against the cutting edge increases as the cut moves away from the hinge.

The guillotine cutting process dulls the blade over time, requiring that it be resharpened. Coated paper such as slick magazine paper dulls the blade more quickly than plain book paper, due to the kaolinite clay coating. Additionally, removing the binding of an entire hardcover book causes excessive wear due to cutting through the cover's stiff backing material. Instead the outer cover can be removed and only interior pages need be cut.

An alternate method of unbinding books is to use a table saw. While this method is potentially dangerous and does not leave as smooth an edge as the guillotine paper cutter method, it is more readily available to the average person. The ideal method is to clamp the book between two thick boards using heavy machine screws to provide the clamping force. The entire wood and book package is fed through the table saw using the rip fence as a guide. A sharp fine carbide tooth blade is ideal for generating an acceptable cut. The quality of the cut depends on the blade, feed rate, type of paper, paper coating, and binding material.

Once the paper is liberated from the spine, it can be scanned one sheet at a time using a traditional flatbed scanner or automatic document feeder.

Pages with a decorative riffled edging or curving in an arc due to a non-flat binding can be difficult to scan using an ADF, as they are designed to scan pages of uniform shape and size, and variably sized or shaped pages can lead to improper scanning. The riffled edges or curved edge can be guillotined off to render the outer edges flat and smooth before the binding is cut.

The coated paper of magazines and bound textbooks can make them difficult for the rollers in an ADF to pick up and guide along the paper path. An ADF which uses a series of rollers and channels to flip sheets over may jam or misfeed when fed coated paper. Generally there are fewer problems by using as straight of a paper path as is possible, with few bends and curves. The clay can also rub off the paper over time and coat sticky pickup rollers, causing them to loosely grip the paper. The ADF rollers may need periodic cleaning to prevent this slipping.

Magazines can pose a bulk-scanning challenge due to small nonuniform sheets of paper in the stack, such as magazine subscription cards and fold out pages. These need to be removed before the bulk scan begins, and are either scanned separately if they include worthwhile content, or are simply left out of the scan process.