October 31, 2017

Exciting New Resources to Support Digital Scholarship at Skillman Library

Are you a Lafayette faculty member who would like to digitize materials for research or teaching purposes? New hardware and software provide exciting capabilities for digitization and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) at Skillman Library.

The Bookeye scanner producing a digital image of an open book

Faculty can request digitization of their research material on the Bookeye scanner, pictured here. Image credit: Elaine Stomber

Last academic year, DSS collaborated with Lafayette College Libraries Special Collections to select and install a Bookeye 4 VI color scanner. The state-of-the-art overhead large-format scanner was purchased with funds generously provided by the Friends of Skillman Library. The scanner is now staffed by DSS student worker Julia Stomber. All faculty are eligible for three hours of DSS staff time per semester of scanning on the Bookeye, which can handle items with dimensions a maximum of approximately 21 x 31 inches. The Bookeye has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities; if you have text objects you would like scanned, it’s possible to have the scanner generate both PDFs and RTFs simultaneously. If you would like to request digitizations on the Bookeye, please complete the DSS Preliminary Request Form, and a DSS staff member will follow up with you regarding available time slots and to coordinate drop-off and pick-up of your research materials. Read more about DSS Digitization Services for Research & Teaching.

The Scannx Book ScanCenter Elite, now available in the Skillman Library Mac Lab

Skillman also has a new scanner to allow you and your students to digitize research materials independently. The Scannx Book ScanCenter Elite, a public book and document scanner, is located in the Mac Lab. The scanner is easy to use: you just push a button on the screen and choose where you want to send the scan (USB, email, smartphone, Dropbox, etc.).

COMING SOON! ABBYY FineReader OCR software. Are you interested in generating text corpora for text analysis, text encoding, and other digital project possibilities? Lafayette ITS and Lafayette College Libraries are collaborating on an effort to make ABBYY OCR software available on library computers. This software allows you to generate text files from document scans. Unlike the OCR function of Adobe Acrobat, ABBYY is trainable; the software can be trained to identify and correct recurrent errors. Check back here on the DSS blog for updates on when ABBYY will available to use.