High-Performance Scanning at the Irish Newspaper Archives
For decades, the Irish Newspaper Archives, along with their sister company MicroMedia Ltd, have been turning their large collection of newspapers into microfilm. With the age of digitalization offering a new level of accessibility, their online database has become the largest digital newspaper archive in Ireland, offering digital scans of currently 18 titles, with more than 9 million pages of news, spanning 245 years.
“With the Flash A1 scanner, our scan productivity has increased by 75% over the existing large volume scanners we had in place.”
Jonathan Martin
The Irish National Archives in numbers
300+ years
of Irish history
6 million+
newspaper pages
6,000
digitized pages per day
Project background
MICROBOX cameras have been used at the INA since the early 1970s, helping create their extensive microfilm archive. MICROBOX technologies have been found to be exceptionally reliable and durable. One particular camera had been in use for almost 30 years, and unsurpassed by comparable newer products, when the arrival of sophisticated scanning technologies finally rendered it obsolete. In the early 2000s, Microfilm cameras were replaced by flatbed scanners. Since then, the INA has used many different models from MICROBOX, the latest of which is the Flash A1.
book2net action
In order to achieve higher productivity when carrying out their digitization projects while at the same time guaranteeing the highest image quality and user-friendliness, the Irish Newspaper Archives were looking for high-end large format scanners. Book2net was able to meet these requirements perfectly with the Flash A1, which enables time-saving double-sided scans up to DIN A2 format. The efficient software can also automatically combine scans of individual A1 pages in a user-friendly manner.
Upgrade with book2net Hornet A0
After successfully using our Flash A1 system, the archive management opted for our A0 system as well. In addition to the expanded format option, which now allows the double-sided scanning of formats up to DIN A1, the dual sensor technology of the book2net Hornet also significantly improves the image quality.
Results
Fast processing, easy large-format scanning and a user-friendly interface are the key features for enhanced productivity, combined with careful handling and the guarantee of constant image quality for further use of the data in the online archive. Those are realized by our large-format scanning systems Flash A1 and Hornet A0. The scan rate for newspapers up to DIN A1 format could be doubled due to the faster two-sided capturing.
About the Flash
