ARTS Digitization of Books and Documents
Tuto službu zajišťuje FF MU
Digitization services include scanning books, articles, and other printed materials, and also post-production treatment, such as turning a scanned text into a digitally processable text, enabling copying into MS Word.
The service is available to...
- employees and doctoral students of Masaryk University
How much does it cost?
The price depends on the number of scanned pages and the selected digitization option. Employees and doctoral students of Masaryk University can use scanning services at discounted prices
Digitization tools
For scanning we use Plustek desktop book scanners, which are gentle to book templates, or other scanners depending on the nature of the digitized documents. For subsequent image processing and text recognition we use ScanTailor and ABBYY Finereader software.
Digitization options
We offer four main types of digitization, including scanning and various levels of image post-processing. You may further apply for digital recognition of text (OCR), which we offer at either a basic or advanced level.
Type A: Scanning
Type A: Scanning
With type A, your publication will be scanned with no further editing. You will receive a folder with colour images (resolution 400 ppi; TIF format) with a visible background (i.e. visible black outlines around the page).
Type A is convenient if you plan on further editing the images yourself, e. g. in graphics programs. The folder will have several GB of data.
Type B: Basic editing
Type B: Basic editing
With type B, your publication will be scanned and migrated into shades of grey (resolution 400 ppi). The resulting images will be cropped, aligned, and combined into a single PDF file. The final pages may show traces of the background depending on the publication.
Type B is convenient if you need a promptly scanned publication and the aesthetics of the resulting PDF is not much of a concern (pages may be unevenly aligned, text may ‘jump’, etc.). The final file size will be much smaller than in type A.
Type C: Advanced editing
Type C: Advanced editing
With type C, your publication will be scanned and migrated into shades of grey (resolution 400 ppi). The images will then be cropped, aligned, and centred with even margins. The result will be brightened, and the quality will be lowered to 300 ppi. These images will be combined into a PDF that is visually pleasing (the text will not ‘jump’ and will be easy to read).
Type C is convenient for archival purposes and for reading on reading devices. The final file size will be smaller than type B.
Type D: Advanced editing and migration to black-and-white
Type D: Advanced editing and migration to black-and-white
With type D, your publication will be scanned either in shades of grey or in colour (resolution: 400 ppi). The images will then be cropped, aligned, and centred with even margins. In the next step, the images will be migrated to black-and-white (all texts; illustrations may be left in colour/ shades of grey) and the resolution will be heightened to 600 ppi. This allows for an easily readable, smooth text. The edited images will be combined into a PDF.
Type D is ideal for archival purposes and for reading on reading devices. The final file size will be 10x smaller than in type C.
Optical character recognition (OCR)
Optical character recognition (OCR) allows for full-text search and copying of text. This service may be applied for separately or in combination with types B through D. With this option, we are able to deliver the final file in other formats, such as DOC, RTF, and TXT.
Basic OCR
Using the basic OCR option, characters in the final PDF will be automatically recognized. The results will be saved with no further editing. The program is not able to precisely recognize all the characters and types of texts (tables, etc.). It is likely that after copying the text, some mistakes will be visible.
Advanced OCR
Using the advanced OCR option, characters in the final PDF will be automatically recognized. We will edit the recognition of various types of texts (tables, etc.) and the most striking errors. This modified text will have only minimal errors when copying.
This service is provided by Centre for Information Technologies at the Faculty of Arts (CIT FF, MU).