Archive for 2013
Using Zeutschel Scanners to Document the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
Editor’s note: October is American Archives Month and a reminder of how important the records of our past are to our future. To celebrate, we’re highlighting five conversion projects throughout the month. Last week we featured Time Life’s LIFE magazine photo archive. Nearly 10M photographic images of iconic American figures were digitized by Crowley Imaging and made available to the public via Google hosting. Today’s blog features the paper archives of our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. “I am a…
Bringing LIFE to Life
Editor’s note: October is American Archives Month and a reminder of how important the records of our past are to our future. To celebrate, we’re highlighting five conversion projects throughout the month. Last week we discussed how the AAAI had created a virtual archive for scientific material that is no longer easily attainable. Today we look at the mass digitization and public sharing of one of the most iconic collections of photos anywhere, the LIFE Photo Archive. The Digitization of…
Making the “Intelligent” Choice to Digitize for Wider Access
Editor’s note: October is American Archives Month and a reminder of how important the records of our past are to our future. To celebrate, we’ll highlight five conversion projects throughout the month. This week’s blog explains how one association has taken the step to create a virtual archive for scientific material that is no longer easily attained on the market or in libraries. AAAI Creates Virtual Archive for Students, Researchers, Historians The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence…
Preserving History through Newspaper Digitization, Part Two
Last week, in the first part of our two-part blog mini-series, “Preserving History through Newspaper Digitization,” we outlined the importance of digitization to the preservation of our nation’s rich history. This week, we are going to take a closer look at newspaper digitization and, more specifically, the digitization of the Carroll County Times, a conversion service project completed by Crowley Imaging. Since its inception, Crowley Imaging has scanned between five and 10 million newspaper images with some of the originals…
Preserving History through Newspaper Digitization, Part One
For years, the spoken word was the primary method with which people conveyed thoughts and ideas, did business, and broadcasted the day’s events. This system was not extremely efficient or particularly accurate. It could take quite some time for news to travel and, often the day’s news would change from its inception throughout its travels. Remember playing the game “Telephone” as a child? As history evolved oral tradition gave way to the written language. Scribes, historians and those with an…
The True Cost of Ownership: Used Scanners
Over the last two weeks, the imaging experts at Crowley have explored the true cost of ownership of production-level digital scanners. Remember, not all scanners are created equal and comparisons must take more factors into consideration than just price. The true cost of ownership looks past the price tag, comparing scanners using a number of different factors, including accuracy, productivity, maintenance, consumable costs, repairs and more. This got us thinking about the true cost of ownership of used scanners. Like…
The Down Low on TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), Part 2
In last week’s blog, we set forth the premise that not all scanners are created equal. There is much more to consider at purchase than the quoted price. After more than three decades of selling and manufacturing digital and analog imaging systems, The Crowley Company has developed a three-point system for clients to discover the true cost of hardware ownership: accuracy, productivity and the true total cost. We discussed accuracy – how well the scanner or equipment performs to…
The Down Low on TCO (True Cost of Ownership) Part 1
In more than thirty years of demonstrating production-level digital scanners and analog equipment to clients worldwide, Crowley has found that one fact has remained constant: comparisons are very rarely apples-to-apples. Once the client need has been clarified (fodder for another blog), there are often multiple scanner options available. Sometimes they’re ours. Sometimes they’re not. Always, though, we encourage prospective buyers to consider the true cost of owning a scanner – including the hidden variables – just as you would…
The Growing Use of Patron Scanners
Patron scanners, like the Zeutschel OS 12000 Bookcopy, the Zeutschel zeta and Wicks and Wilson UScan, are growing in popularity for many reasons. These scanners provide users an easy-to-operate walk-up experience – similar to that of a paper copier or microfilm reader/printer– but one that offers higher technology, lower maintenance, more features, media protection via gentle handling functionality and green benefits. Patron scanners, or “on-demand” scanners as they are called in the industry, are increasingly found in academic libraries, records/vital…
Can We Get a Resolution? Taking a Closer Look at Image Quality and DPI
Last week, in our blog, “Can We Get A Resolution? The mystery of the “right” DPI/PPI,” we explored the question, “What is the Right dpi/ppi?” The bottom line is that dpi/ppi is not “one size fits all.” As Christopher Crowley, our company president noted, “the right dpi/ppi is really a balancing act between the expected end use of the file (archival vs. non), the cost of file storage, the cost of bandwidth to share/transmit files, the cost of equipment to…