F irst was the introduction of audiovisual and multimedia. Then, the query service catalog web, through which we can locate a book, magazine or a picture, to know if it is available, consult the bibliographic record, and even read its contents.
In recent years, funds have been incorporated into digital documents that can even read in full through the network, and to have appeared first books directly created for this medium. The most valuable of archival documents are usually printed on paper. Many of them are old, some damaged by time and use, or conservation problems. Your scan will be a great effort, but many state and university libraries are already down to work with document imaging.
And, unlike paper, digital media reconciles his two greatest interests well: the availability of information and the preservation of the originals.
A good number of originals are monochrome and treated, therefore, grayscale, color capture but can help remove any stains on the paper. Many of the illustrations are engraved with the same ink printed in the text, so that their treatment does not differ too much. At other times, images and even text are in color.
Another feature of the ancient texts is that technical effects are images. Many manuscripts, and others who already have their own printing typography aspect of the site is substantial.
For modern books, in which the focus is on information, the process can continue with optical character recognition-OCR-that will transform them into editable text. You can then make a new page of text and pictures, developing the digital book as a new version, much more manageable, the original.
Formats and sizes
In addition to its utility computing resources consumed by the editable text are ridiculous compared to an image.
Each page of white A4 paper full of black text in Arial or Times 11 point is in RTF or PDF document about 15 KB, while the image in grayscale and 240 dpi resolution in memory occupies 5.5 MB , which can be converted to 200 KB when you save a TIFF file with LZW compression.
Contrary to what one might think, well defined black text on pure white hardly be further reduced with JPEG, even at maximum compression and degradation involved. However, our own that can drop to about 150 KB in GIF format with 16 levels of gray, not hard enough for the characters too, and even less than 100 KB in 8-bit PNG.
