Kirtas Technologies - The World Leader in Quality Book Digitization

Using Z39.50 (or other specifed protocol), bibliographic metadata from the book's MARC record can be automatically retrieved.

KABIS I, II, and III are used for high-resolution digitization of books. Oversize materials, foldouts, postcards, newspapers, and other works on paper can be imaged using SkyView and Gateway. Each system uses Canon's 21.1 MP EOS digital SLR cameras. Hi-res JPEG files are created from the Camera RAW file and used for image processing in BookScan Editor. Camera RAW files (.cr2) can be stored off-site for TIFF conversion using third party applications.

METADATA

Kirtas collects important data at each step of the imaging workflow, including descriptive, technical, and structural metadata. The accuracy of OCR directly affects the quality of the metadata. With accurate OCR, text can be extracted from books and reflowed into multiple formats. The future of electronic publishing is headed in this direction. Kirtas can create METS/ALTO structured metadata (from the Library of Congress), PDF book-tagging, and other logical XML schemas. With Kirtas, digitized books are ready for the future.

BookScan Editor is powerful software used to manage how a book is processed. Each book is given an individual template, which can be stored later for batch processing many books at once. BSE comes with a rich set of tools for processing images, including auto-cropping, clamp removal, brightness and contrast adjustments, background removal, image segmentation, and more. BSE is capable of using and outputting either TIFF or JPEG images. BSE can be installed with a single user license, or on a server allowing up to 5 remote users simultaneously.

After a book is templated, it goes through a QC stage which is used to fine-tune each page and identify any missing pages. Tagging is also done at this stage. The OCR Manager upgrade helps automate tagging by performing OCR on the Tables of Contents and Illustrations. The book is either passed forward for processing or rejected at this point.

With KQ Services, Kirtas can remotely connect to the RA Server and provide all necessary image processing without transferring any files over the network. Our teams are well trained at each step of the workflow, saving you both time and labor. Standard KQ Services include basic image processing, OCR, PDF creation, tagging, METS/ALTO, and more.

Processed master images are sent to the JPEG 2000 compression module, which batch processes images according to userdefined settings for lossless or lossy images. JPEG 2000 is an archival compression standard that allows for easy reversal to an image’s original state. Kirtas' JPEG 2000 module has its own dedicated processor, improving compression speed up to 5x faster than most software plug-ins.

OCR Manager uses the acclaimed ABBYY FineReader and Sakhr OCR engines for over 190 languages, including 5 right-to-left languages. OCR Manager can be used to generate PDF, .xml, .txt., and .doc files simultaneously.

Kirtas uses your images and metadata to create print-on-demand facsimiles of your books, as well as searchable electronic downloads through our website KirtasBooks.com is a great storefront to make your rare books available online, even before anything has been digitized. It's all part of our new Digitize-on-Demand program, which allows book sales and royalties to ofset the cost of digitization.