📚 **This robot scans rare library books at 2,500 pages per hour**
"_Built in Austria, the bot does exactly what its name implies—it autonomously scans and digitizes manuscripts. But whereas it might take a single librarian days or weeks to scan a single book, the ScanRobot 2.0 can handle up to 2,500 per hour._"
I have to agree, it would have to be a very adventurous archivist who would trust a delicate one of a kind manuscript to automation.
@bibliolater @bookstodon the text there slightly mixes up pages and books. 2500 books per hour would be wild
@babble_endanger @bibliolater @bookstodon even 2500 pages an hour is pretty wild on old fragile books, and would be unsafe on archives and manuscripts 🤔🤓
@bibliolater @bookstodon
Years ago I built a scanner something like this one, but the mechanism is my hands, not any automation. I can do a 400 page book in an evening (but it gets super boring, I admit). "Days or weeks" is nonsense.
Done by hand, errors can be spotted and corrections made on the spot. I've seen many many scans on archive dot org where a page or three is totally botched or missed right in the middle of a book.
High speed has its place, but not at the price of quality.
I completely agree.
@demerara @bibliolater @bookstodon
To be honest, this is much more frequent on Google scans than on Archive.org scans, that are generally very good
But many scans on archive.org come from Google, sooo.... 🤔
@bibliolater The first time I saw this machine was at the Frankfurt International Book Fare more than 10 years ago. I've seen others like that years earlier, and they're now faster. Gradual evolution, I'd say.
As to digitization of manuscripts: strong doubt. Old mass-printed books, maybe 10 to 20 decades old, sure. But an invaluable folio with hand written text?
@bookstodon