The Generations Network and Kirtas Technologies to Digitize More Than 75 Million Historical Family Records

I wrote about Kirtas Technologies in a Plus Edition article a year or so ago. The company produces book scanners: place a book in the machine, press a button and walk away. The device will scan every page in the book, using a robotic arm to flip the pages of the book as needed. Now the company is announcing the sale of two of the company's APT BookScan 2400 book scanners to The Generations Network (better known as Ancestry.com).

The devices will capture close to 5,000 pages per hour. The Generations Network says the company will use the devices to capture immigration records and city directories that date back to the 1820s.

The following announcement was written by Kirtas Technologies:

ROCHESTER, NY - February 12, 2007 -- Kirtas Technologies has signed an agreement with The Generations Network that is connecting families to rare historical information found in bound books, including immigration records and city directories that date back to the 1820s. As some of this information is so irreplaceable that it cannot be touched with the human hand, The Generations Network, which includes Ancestry.com, will rely on Kirtas' robotic page-turning technology to archive these critical records and increase the speed of production to almost 7 million images monthly from various source media.

"Original information that links families to their heritage is being held captive between the covers of countless fragile books," said Lotfi Belkhir, chief executive officer, Kirtas Technologies. "By working with The Generations Network, we can ensure this information is not only safeguarded for centuries to come, but easily accessible and available to families and genealogists in any location."

The Generation Network is using two of Kirtas' APT BookScan 2400s for non-destructive scanning. It captures close to 5,000 pages per hour. Ensuring the highest image quality, the APT BookScan 2400 incorporates two 16.6 megapixel digital SLR cameras, each dedicated to either left or right pages. The product ensures that books are opened at comfortable angles that are gentle to the spine and minimize page curvature. The Generations Network is also leveraging Kirtas' BookScan Editor ™ Software Suite for high quality optical character recognition which provides finished digitized images with metadata indexing.

"Some of the books we are archiving are insured for thousands of dollars and are so rare they cannot be touched with the human hand," said Michael Daniels, director of Digital Preservation, The Generations Network. "The robotic arm and advanced paper handling from the APT BooksScan 2400 provides the safest way for us to separate and turn pages and capture this delicate information and at twice the speed."

The Generations Network is also working with Kirtas Technologies to test new inventions that assist the company with their growing internal content production needs. For more information about Kirtas Technologies visit http://www.kirtastech.com/.

About KirtasTechnologies                                                                                                                   
Kirtas Technologies was founded in 2001 with the vision of bringing to the digital realm the massive knowledge sitting on library shelves, government archives and corporate storerooms. Today, the company's revolutionary technology redefines digitization of all bound documents, delivering gentler handling and higher image quality faster, with fewer errors, and at a lower cost than any other solution in the marketplace.

Comments

[Sally J]

Be sure to click on the image so you can see how the machine turns the pages. Fascinating! However, I'm a little concerned about using it on fragile items. Is this really the appropriate technology for a book from 1820? I've heard the Google scanning project rejects anything it deems too fragile to survive the scanning process.

-Sally J.
"The Practical Archivist"

[John]

There is no way you can put a book (valuable or otherwise) in the Kirtas scanners and walk away. They require constant operator attention (if only to watch for pending damage so the machine can be shutdown), Also the pages need flattening by human hand, once the robot arm has turned the page, to avoid curvature in the image. And with color capture, actual throughput from scanning to a finished, processed image is closer to 1000 pages per hour (per 2400 machine).

Here's a link to a video of a Kirtas machine in operation at the University of Toronto:

http://www.archive.org/details/scanning_robot

Note that the operator has to help out with difficult pages (and older books are classified as difficult.

Here is a librarian at the Dallas Theological Seminary library posting about what books to avoid when using a Kirtas scanner:

http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0505b&L=archives&P=3363

They are only using it on "NON-rare" books becasue it can occasionally tear a page!

For valuable books, something like the i2s CopiBook would be a better (and cheaper) alternative:

http://www.iiri.com/copibook/copibook_iiri.pdf

About $40,000 for the color model, doesn't use any bright lighting, and the University of Florida is using 5 of them to digitize books, and also newspapers. The Copibook can do books up to 17*24", whereas the Kirtas only goes up to 11"*14". Many government records are larger than 11*14. Also the CopiBook uses a shutterless camera design, nothing to wear out, the Kirtas uses Canon consumer cameras that wear out their shutters at 250,000-500,000 images. Which means that to scan 75 million pages you will need the cameras replaced over 150 times. If running the machines in a 24*7 operation the cameras need to be replaced every couple of weeks.

Kirtas themselves only rate the lifetime of the APT 2400 to be 10 million pages:

http://www.kirtastech.com/APT_2400/faq.asp

[Steve]

The Kirtas OCR program in BSE Pro (which uses ABBYY Finereader) comes with a 100K page per month "dongle". Therefore they are limited to 200,000 pages recognised per month, with two dongles, unless they pay up big bucks to get more/larger limit OCR dongles.