Hello, I’m Pete Marsden one of the digitisation assistants working out at the Gyle in West Edinburgh, and this is what I get up to……..

Here is a sneak peek behind the scenes at the library annexe where the thesis digitising team are hard at work. We have over 20,000 theses, most of which are duplicates, to scan over the next 18 months.

The theses are double checked on our spreadsheet to ensure that they are indeed duplicates and haven’t previously been scanned, when we are happy with this, the thesis has its boards removed with a sharp knife.

The next stage is to remove the binding using a manual guillotine and a bit of elbow grease. The thesis is now ready to move on to the scanning stage.

A Kodak i4250 document scanner is utilised for this step, this scans at 150 pages per minute producing pdf format files which are then sent to the image processing stage (more of which later).

 

Next time we will look at the image processing using Limb software.