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What Is Digitization?
Digitizing Bound Documents: How It Works
Digitization is often confused with scanning. But digitization is much more.
It doesn't just involve taking a picture of a text. It's about making that text available in every other format, both print and digital.
How is it done?
The first step is to convert each page into a digital image by scanning or photographing it.
Prior to Kirtas Technologies' innovations, even major organizations had to do this by hand, placing pages on scanners one page at a time.
Barely a hundred pages an hour could be scanned at that rate, and the cost in time and employees using the old method was considerable.
Eventually automated scanning machines were created. But most require the pages to be cut out -- a disaster for rare books.
The Kirtas Revolution
Then Kirtas Technologies introduced automated book-scanning devices which could turn pages and scan bound books and documents without damaging them. And which could do so at a far quicker rate. The Kirtas approach now uses a robotic arm to flip pages past a 16-megapixel Canon digital camera or cameras.
Common everyday scanning stops at the capture stage. digitization goes beyond -- it not only captures the image but uses a software program to process it. The program clarifies the image, crops it to the desired sized, centers the text on the page, removes smudges and artifacts and other errors.
The result is a text image that's often superior in quality and clarity to the original!
Making Text Searchable
Although the image can at this point be read and even transferred as a digital file or posted online, searching through the text is impossible. For that, word-recognition or OCR (optical character recognition) software is needed.
OCR software searches for letter-shapes in the image, 'recognizes' them as letters and words, and converts the text into a word-processing document with text that can be searched, edited, copied, pasted, and transformed or reproduced in thousands of ways.
Digitization lets readers take a book or bound document and turn it into a Word document, an e-book, an email attachment, a CD, a web page, a document that can be viewed and downloaded by anyone in the world, or that can be searched for critical passages or content at lightning speed.
Not only does digitization turn knowledge from books to bytes, it can even turn the bytes back into books again, in new readable print editions that can be marketed online through organizations like Amazon.com.
Contact us today and learn more.