The Generations Network

The Generations Network and Kirtas Technologies Team Up To Digitize More Than 75 Million Historical Family Records: "Original information that links families to their heritage is being held captive between the covers of countless fragile books,' said Lotfi Belkhir, chief executive officer, Kirtas Technologies. 'By working with The Generations Network, we can ensure this information is not only safeguarded for centuries to come, but easily accessible and available to families and genealogists in any location.'

The Generation Network is using two of Kirtas' APT BookScan 2400s for non-destructive scanning. It captures close to 5,000 pages per hour. Ensuring the highest image quality, the APT BookScan 2400 incorporates two 16.6 megapixel digital SLR cameras, each dedicated to either left or right pages. The product ensures that books are opened at comfortable angles that are gentle to the spine and minimize page curvature. The Generations Network is also leveraging Kirtas' BookScan Editor ™ Software Suite for high quality optical character recognition which provides finished digitized images with metadata indexing.

'Some of the books we are archiving are insured for thousands of dollars and are so rare they cannot be touched with the human hand,' said Michael Daniels, director of Digital Preservation, The Generations Network. 'The robotic arm and advanced paper handling from the APT BooksScan 2400 provides the safes"