Book / Document Digital Scanner

Did anyone see on the TV news a couple of months ago, a new machine has been made that can copy and scan from a paper book/document into a fully finished and bound book/document format, all in the matter of minutes.
Though the machine was unveiled as good for copying reference books and novels etc, it seems to me that the possibilities for researchers like us are endless.

To mis-quote TV wine tasters, I'm getting TNA, with a strong nose of Station ORBs, and just a hint of DORIS and airfield plans!

Disscuss the possibilities

Did anyone see on the TV news a couple of months ago, a new machine has been made that can copy and scan from a paper book/document into a fully finished and bound book/document format, all in the matter of minutes.

I didn`t see this but was aware that such machines exist. Naturally it's something we're interested in as such a requirement will arise in respect of the Digital Archive.

Some of the newer OCR packages are quite clever in the way they handle the "dark bit in the middle" that makes scanning pages from books such a trial on home scanners.

The issue with books and pamphlets etc will always be the time involved "turning the pages" and dealing with the dark bits as very few books fold flat without risk of damage.

Did this device photograph the book from above? - were the pages turned manually?

Some of the big commercial document processing labs actually recommend that wherever possible "non unique" books be disassembled scanned and professionally rebound for best (and cheaper) results.

Thanks for the post mawganmad - if you can find a link to the programme I`d be very interested to see it.

Cheers
Dave

AiXAdmin;32002 wrote:

The issue with books and pamphlets etc will always be the time involved "turning the pages" and dealing with the dark bits as very few books fold flat without risk of damage.

Did this device photograph the book from above? - were the pages turned manually?
Dave

Hi Dave, I wish I took more attention of it and posted about it back then, but I believe the major leap forward of this device was how it could physically scan a book etc with out causing the normally associated damage to it, and doing so at quite a high speed.
I will try and find extra info, it was on the main BBC1 news.

Thanks.. I`ll try the Beebs Website, but please post if you find anything before I do.

Meanwhile let's all take a guess at what one will cost...

Cheers
Dave

The device in question is called a "Book Eye Scanner".

Thanks listopad... don`t quote me on this but a bit of Googling came up with $33,000 US for one... (with a buy online button!!)

Looks a handy bit of kit though... so nothing ventured.

Dear Santa..

My name is Dave, I'm kind to animals, eat my greens and help do the washing up.

Please may I have a Book Eye Scanner.

Hope Rudolph is well.

Dave

That's supposing it is the same machine, this was unveiled to quite a fanfare and implied as having capabilities well beyond established kit, hence news item.
I'm guessing it would cost a fortune, but what I'm kind of getting at is that if TNA (for example) actually owned one of these, it would pretty well revolutionise how we could copy documents. I assume it would save a document in its memory once it has copied it.
Can you imagine ordering and copying a whole ORB in minutes?

BTW, what is OCR?

PNK;32033 wrote:

OCR = Optical Character Recognition.
Converts a picture of text into editable text, normally a Word Document or PDF.

Ah right, I can't be sure but I don't think the idea is to produce editable pages from documents, it just takes an original hard copy and produces new ones, but faster and in a less damaging way than before.