The Digital Dungeon

I am involved in a project that has 14,000 books in it. The books tend to be relatively short, which means each one scans in about 15 minutes (on average). With two Kirtas machines, and the Atiz scanner to back up the machines by putting the items that won’t scan automatically on it, I have estimated that we could finish 128-158 books a day at only 80% efficiency (running 18 hours a day, both machines are being utilized 14 hours of the time- all week). That means, if we can make sure the machines are being used 14 hours a day, then we could get finished with our 14,000 book project in less than a year. 109 days at 128 books a day... So, four months. Originaly, we expected the project would take us 45 years. That's quite a difference. We haven't reached 128 books a day yet due to staffing issues. In the next month, those staffing issues should disapear, and we'll see if it really works in practice like it does in theory.

I love the Atiz scanner for it's simplicity, good design, and utility. I love the Kirtas scanners for their speed and their "wow" factor when people see the things work. The only problem I have at the moment is taking our current Kirtas workflow (using Kirtas's software Bookscan Editor, Superbatch, and OCR manager), and finding a way to make the Atiz scanner workflow work with it. The Atiz machine came with a hefty batch editing program that does a great job of cleaning up the images and making them wonderfully presentable. The machine even came with a PDF maker, but it doesn't OCR on its own, and it doesn't give you the options that Kirtas' OCR manager do. So, I want to process the Atiz scanner finished images using Kirtas’s OCR manager. However, that seems to be more difficult than I had first expected. For the next month, I’ll be trying to figure out how to make this marriage of Atiz and Kirtas systems work. If it ends up failing, then I may have t...

So, the batching will all the perfect settings took about 10 minutes past scanning, which (in the long run) isn’t that bad), but it’s not perfect. I’m going to try a fewer settings this week and see is that is quicker. I will say that the batching options are wonderful, including de-skew, background removal, croping, and "black edge removal". The product is pretty and readable, and abled to be OCRed on the spot, which is an impressive thing.

I haven’t updated in a while, mostly due to the holidays and also because I wanted to be able to have something to write about the new Atiz Bookdrive DIY scanner. Now I have something to write about so here it goes. The AC adapters for the cameras came in, so we were able to scan without the interruptions of chagrining the batteries. We scanned a whole book, and processed it with the software. The book was 540 pages long, and on one of the slowest settings the book was finished in an hour, which seems a little slow, but for $10,000 I think that’s fast enough. Plus, I haven’t yet started to tweak anything to make the speed faster. I left the book batching with the software that came with the machine. I’ll try to post the times today. If batching takes an hour, then this machine will be perfectly timed. So far I am very impressed with the batching capabilities of the software. You get a clean image without much human intervention. I’ll post examples when I can. I’m still very imp...

Today I got the scanner working and taking pictures in 30 minutes today. I aligned the cameras, set the time delay, and started scanning. I cannot express how impressed I am with this set up. I admit I was not expecting the machine to take pictures based on a time delay, so that you could just turn the pages and let the machine go. This little feature which exploits the time delay of the cameras, increases output to 700+ pages an hour easy. The cradle adjusts back and forth due to pressure and nothing else. It slides, and whichever side of the book is thickest, it moves in that direction. This means that you don’t have to constantly keep readjusting the cradle as a thick book moves through its pages. It also means that you can scan a book with a spine that is over 4 inches (which is a limit for the Kirtas machines). The cameras can be set to autofocus before each shot, which means that you don’t have to stop to fix the focus if it gets off. I also played around with the image...

So, the assembly was quick. Me and two other people got the whole thing set up in an hour and a half. The instructions were a bit vague at times, but the parts fit together in a logical way. One thing that did bother me was that the set up did not come with the AC adapters for the cameras to plug into the wall instead of running on batteries. I contacted the sales rep and she said the AC adapters were extra, and I could have included them in the order- although I never was told that I needed to. At any rate, they end up being $80 a piece and so we’re just going to buy them. The big point is I got the cameras to work today after about 30 minutes of fiddling with things. It turns out the USB extensions that were sent with the equipment have too wide of a plug to fit into the camera properly. However, the cameras came with USB plugs that worked perfectly (although they are a bit shorter than the extensions). So, the assembly was quick. Me and two other people got the whole thing set up in...

Today the new Atiz BookDrive DIY came in, and I can't wait to put it together. It was reletivly cheap, at $10,000 for the whole setup (Cameras, scanner, etc. but not a computer). Of course, we only got the normal book size and not the newspaper size, but we were working under a budget. Atiz posts their manual on-line, so if you want to see what I'll be doing tomorrow to get this thing set up you can see it at http://www.atiz.com/Download/bookdrive_diy_manual.pdf . Once we get this thing in a production environment, I'll post a review of the equipment.

At work we are looking at the Atiz Bookdrive . The two Atiz products (The Bookdrive DIY and the Book snap) end up being very affordable options for digitization. An organization, depending on what options they want, can get a setup for anywhere from $3000-$10,000. I haven't seen this equipment in person, but once I do, I'll be sure to post about it.