All posts by Anton Kozik

New Japan’s scanning technology: “book-flipping scanning”

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According to the Agence France-Presse, researchers from Tokyo’s Graduate School of Information Science and Technology have created a prototype system that allows to scan books while flipping pages. In other words, a person who wants to scan an entire book, only has to riffle. Using the developed prototype, a book having 170 pages can be scanned in 60 seconds.

“Book-flipping scanning system” components includes a camera, which is able to take 500 images per second, infrared lasers and computer. Distortions caused by curvature of the pages during the flipping are measured with infrared beams. Subsequently, the parties are “flattened” programmatically by using the three-dimensional model.

Despite the fact that this technology exceeds the potential of the application related only to the scanning of books, “book-flipping scanning” can accelerate the process of digitization of the printed cultural heritage. For example, to scan 110 200 objects (as much as it is for today in the largest Polish digital library – Digital Library of Wielkopolska), assuming that the average time for the “raw” scan for one digital object is 60 seconds, you should spend approximately 77 full days.

Unfortunately this system is suitable mainly for digitizing books in good condition. Copies in poor condition may be destroyed during the paging. Other types of publications, such as postcards or newspapers, cannot be simply riffled.

The team plans to finish work on the final version of the prototype of the “world’s fastest scanning system” in two years. Materials that present technology in action, can be found at http://www.k2.tu-tokyo.ac.jp/vision/BookFlipScan/index-e.html

IV Ukrainian Conference “Library and Book in the Context of Time”

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On 14-15 of April 2010 in Kiev, Ukraine the IV conference “Library and Book in the Context of Time” was held. The conference scope joins scientific topics with the information useful for practitioners. The main organizer of this conference is the National Parliament Library of Ukraine. In this year the main topic of the conference was “Libraries activities on the preservation of national cultural heritage”.
First day of the conference was dedicated to the multi-aspect analysis of this topic including legal issues, practical experiences and case studies. During this day a presentation “Polish Digital Libraries in the PIONIER Network” was made by Marcin Werla and Anton Kozik from the PSNC Digital Libraries Team. The presentation shown the role of PSNC in the development of digital libraries in Poland, the dLibra Digital Library Framework and national and international projects working on metadata aggregation (including the Polish Digital Libraries Federation, EuropeanaLocal and Europeana).
The second day of the conference was devoted to a practical seminar, which main topic was “Presentation of national cultural heritage in the digital environment”. The seminar was mostly about various IT solutions in the libraries domain. A presentation by Anton Kozik was made during this day on the dLibra system and its functionality. This was possible because of the cooperation between PSNC and Lviv National Scientific Library established with the help of the Digital Center company. One of the first results of this cooperation was the professional Ukrainian translation of the dLibra system.
After the presentation there were several questions of quite wide scope: from the technical details of dLibra to the organizational issues of the Digital Libraries Federation.
We hope, that the result of this conference will be the increased interest in dLibra and digital libraries in general in the community of Ukrainian librarians. This can be the start of cooperation with organizations interested in this topic and the basis for future exchange of experience in the digital libraries development.
It is worth to mention that one of the popular systems for the creation of digital libraries behind our easter border is called… T-Libra. The on-line demo of this software is available here (registration required).

XII All-Russian Scientific Conference RCDL’10

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On the 1st of April expires the time of sending an application for attending RCDL’10 as a speaker. RCDL’10 is the twelfth conference in the series of All-Russian scientific conferences “Digital Libraries: Advanced Methods and Technologies, Digital Collections”. In 2010 the conference will last from 13 to 17 October and will be hosted by Kazan State University in Kazan.

Over the period of 11 years hundreds of scientists from the leading scientific centers of Russia, Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, the USA, Ukraine and other countries have taken part in the RCDL conferences. On RCDL significant attention is paid to fundamental and interdisciplinary research and projects that are focused on solving complex practical problems. In particular, research in the field of creating highly-scalable digital libraries (called the Very Large Digital Library).

Conference topics include the following guidelines and developments in digital libraries:
1. Methods and models for information representation.
2. Metadata, ontologies and instruments for information representation.
3. Perspective infrastructures of digital libraries, digital libraries in grid-sphere and cloud computing.
4. Virtual mediums for scientific investigations.
5. Social nets and digital libraries.
6. Instrumental methods of digital libraries and digital collections creation.
7. Methods and technologies of working with text, multimedia and semistructured information.
8. Information storage methods and digital archives.
9. Interoperability and fusion of information.
10. Scientometric measuring in digital libraries.
11. Information security.
12. User interface, human element.
13. Digital libraries in science, education, culture, medicine and economics.
14. Technology standards of digital libraries.

Members of the Program Commitee are leading scientists of Russian Academy of Science (http://www.ras.ru), representatives of russian, american and european scientific circles and largest IT companies.

More information in English and Russian can be found on http://rcdl2010.ksu.ru.