IEEE Spectrum January, 2008 - 9

"This is the entire knowledge of this
period" -Markus Brantl, director of the
Bavarian State Library's digitization center

Book-Scanning
Robots Digitize
Delicate Texts
21st-century robots read 16th-century
Bavarian books

s

tudents come from
the world over to study
the Bavarian State
Library's collection of works
from the time of Martin
Luther. But this year, the
Munich institution's 450th in
existence, the most voracious
readers of its ancient collection will be a pair of
robots. In the library's basement, two machines called
ScanRobots are whirring
away at 700 pages per hour
and are scheduled to digitize
all of the four-century-old
books in the library, some
7.5 million pages' worth, by
2009; the scanned books will
be put online.
Markus Brantl, director
of the library's digitization
center, says it's vital to digitize unique content like the
16th-century collection, both
for preservation purposes
and to open access for readers, academics, and laypersons alike. "This is the entire
knowledge of this period,
[from] theology to mathematics-everything," he says.
But in making the material
much more widely available,
the Bavarian library is also
giving a boost to a scrappy
band of robot engineers from
Austria's Vienna University
of Technology, who are out to
upset the scanning market.
18

The ScanRobots are the
debut project for Treventus
Mechatronics, which spun
out of the university after
Professor Wolfgang Zagler
sketched out the idea for
the machines on a train ride
in 2002. What makes the
robots unique is their ability to scan books that are
opened only to a 60-degree
angle, which keeps the
spines and pages of older
books from being damaged
by the strain of being fully
opened. The US $125 000
machines work by holding the pages in place with
soft suction and moving a
scanning head vertically
while the book is held open
underneath. The scan head
contains two 30-degree
glass prisms that project
onto high-quality cameras.
The head doesn't touch the
page-the scanning camera records both open pages
through the prisms simultaneously in high resolution
as it methodically moves
up and down, like an oversize sewing machine needle.
Gentle air jets turn each page
after the scan is complete.
Nightmares of sucking pages
out of the Gutenberg Bible
will remain just that, idle
anxiety dreams, promises
Stephan Tratter, a former

na * IEEE SpEctrum * January 2008

a DElICaTE TaSK: A pair of extra-gentle digitizing robots scan books
at the Bavarian state Library. photos: treventus Mechatronics

grad student at the university and now head of marketing and R&D at Treventus.
Tratter says the firm got
off the ground only after
winning a few European
research contests for seed
money. Its first robot prototype went through trials at
the University of Innsbruck,
in Austria, last spring, and
the firm now has robots
at three other sites.
Even though the
ScanRobot doesn't have legs
or wheels, Tratter says it is
indeed a robot and not just a
glorified photocopy machine.
"This one turns the pages
automatically. In principle,
it has no need of an operator," he says, although with
such delicate projects as the
one in Munich, there will be
one. "The robot is also able
to recognize errors and learn
not to make them again."
Brantl is glad to hear that.

His digitization department
has been working for 10 years
and now has 23 000 books
online. The ScanRobots will
surpass that figure this year
alone. The library ordered the
Austrian book-bots last fall
to handle delicate digitization
work like the 16th-century
project. The Bavarian State
Library, one of the largest
in the German-speaking
world, has already cast its
lot with Google in the sometimes controversial struggles
over digitizing and posting
online the vast volume of literature that no longer is covered by copyright law. When
the job is done, says Brantl,
the Bavarian library will have
digital versions of 1 million
of its 9 million possessions,
including its 80 000 medieval
manuscripts and 20 000
incunabula (printed books
made before 1501).
-Michael Dumiak
www.spEcTrum.IEEE.OrG
http://www.spEcTrum.IEEE.OrG
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum January, 2008
