What do the Monterey, Michigan SDA Church record book, the Advent Shield and Review from 1844-45, and A Sketch of the Christian Experience and Views of Ellen G. White with Hiram Edson’s signature on the cover have in common? All these items were digitized last month by the CAR digitization team! Things have really changed and we are excited to see the results.

At the beginning of the year, we purchased a Kodak sheet-fed scanner that has allowed us to scan loose pages and cut books at a rate of 30 pages a minute (front and back)! We are using this machine to scan the books that we can cut and to digitize the White Document Files (see insert). The software allows for each scan to render two images, one in color for archiving, and one in black and white to compile into a format that will enable it to be read online.

To date this machine has produced over 2,500 files that have been subsequently attached to our library catalog. We are currently working to scan the entire collection of 2,700 White Document Files.

In May 2012, we purchased a flatbed camera scanner that allows us to digitize items that are more fragile, such as our vault books and other rare manuscripts. An item, such as a book, is placed on the platform and a sheet of glass is lowered over it. The scanner then makes a pass over the item with bright LED lights and takes a picture. The software is then able to crop out the borders and render a perfect scan of the item. We spent a few months testing and getting the kinks out, and we are now in full production with the goal of digitizing the entire vault collection of books. It takes about 10 seconds to scan a two-page spread, with the post-processing of compiling the images into a format to be read online taking about 10 minutes for the average size book. Last month we produced 210 items to attach to the catalog, comprising 6,000 images, most of which were vault materials.

Our goal has always been to preserve our precious materials, but with the advent of the new equipment, we are now able to make the materials we scan quickly available to our patrons. While not all of the items we scan will be attached to our catalog due to copyright laws, we hope to provide our patrons with a much wider selection of digital materials within the next year.

To browse our growing collection of digital titles, visit our library catalog at http://andrews.edu/library and type “Andrews Digital Library” in the search box.