Zeta Book Scanner

This morning I got to play around on the Zeta Book Scanner. A document scanning solution for libraries that do a lot of digitising of resources.

[via instagram]

My first gut reaction was, why not the photocopier/scanner. But once I had a play with it and I saw the resolution and the ease in which you could use it for a lot of scanning, I was sold. The university of course does a lot of scanning for lecturers needing to put online readings on their intranet.




Scanning on a photocopier often involves breaking the back of a book or damaging it to get the copy done properly and photocopiers are often prone to sshadowingin the quality of their scan. Great for a page or handout, but not for a book. With more and more libraries digitising their out of copyright resources for general use, a tool like this would most likely be an expensive purchase.


For the School Library

A device like this would not be affordable for your average school library, but if you were in the process of archiving old magazines or documents as part of an anniversary project, then this would certainly make it easier.

Teacher Librarians are often asked to scan and catalogue articles for Senior School students. The process for this would be to scan, refine, copyright log, then catalogue.

Adobe Acrobat Pro can be used to clean up the images to ensure that you don't have those "black marks around the outside of the page images.