Home > McGill U Library Scanning Rare Books with Kirtas

News

McGill U Library Scanning Rare Books with Kirtas

8/26/2008

Bookmark and Share

McGill University Library in Montreal will be using a Kirtas Technologies APT BookScan 2400RA to digitize its collections. The company said that the 2400RA is capable of acquiring page images at the rate of 2,400 pages per hour. The library will be working with Ristech, a Canadian reseller, to implement the digitization solution.

"The technology made available by Kirtas will allow us to reveal the treasures of McGill Library to the world and enable sophisticated means of resource discovery," said Janine Schmidt, Trenholme director of libraries.

While the library was an early adopter of digitizing books--its efforts began in 1996--this is its first attempt at a large-scale, mass digitization of texts from its diverse rare book collections. Among the 300,000 titles housed in Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill are collections of art and architecture, Canadiana, history, literature, philosophy (including a renowned David Hume Collection), travel and exploration, and the history of the book.

Once the books are digitized and processed, files will be made available worldwide through the library's online catalog. Readers will be able to obtain books printed on demand through major online retailers such as Amazon.com and Lulu.com.


Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.

Cite this Site

Dian Schaffhauser, "McGill U Library Scanning Rare Books with Kirtas," Campus Technology, 8/26/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=66659

copy text (above) for proper citation



Recommended Reading
  • Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck

    Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.

  • U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells

    The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.

  • George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum

    George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.

  • Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator

    The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.

  • ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard

    ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.

  • Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month

    Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.