DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FOR LIBRARIES

Make your prized collection accessible anytime and anywhere

As an essential gateway to knowledge, libraries have always served to preserve cultural heritage, enrich education and help shape new ideas. But library collections are at risk of deterioration and the loss of that knowledge forever, and physical access to collections can be limited. The answer to both challenges is digital access, which has now become a practical solution for libraries large and small. 

Digitization lets you preserve your collections, on your shelves and deep in storage, while you provide easy access and searchability to students, researchers, scholars and the general public via the internet, anywhere in the world. And digitization delivers so much more. Ideally suited to the digital and social media age, digital collections also present countless opportunities for enhancing educational programs and boosting visitor engagement with immersive exhibits, interactive displays and other fresh new ideas for programming.

Whether your collection includes rare and fragile books and manuscripts, delicate photographic negatives, works on paper, sculpture, medieval manuscripts and Japanese scrolls – or just a vast number of modern books and newspapers, you require a solution that offers an extraordinary combination of conservation handling, preservation image quality, production speed, and extensive flexibility.

Pixel Acuity has the solution.

Our worldwide client base of major academic and research libraries knows us as the authority on heritage digitization, with an in-depth understanding of the issues and challenges of working with your collections. Pixel Acuity offers specialized skills, techniques and workflow experience, combined with advanced digitization technology purpose-built by our hardware division DT Heritage. Together, our team of experts in digitization hardware, software, services and workflow optimization work hand-in-hand to deliver a seamless experience for library imaging projects of every possible scope.

 

Some of the things that set Pixel Acuity apart:

• Not sure where to start, how long it will take, what equipment you need, or how to pay for it? The Pixel Acuity team will help plan your project, including technological assessments and development of timelines and budgets, to determine the best solution for your project. 
• Rare books, manuscripts, works on paper, room-size paintings, maps, tabletop art, jewelry, even bees — we’ve brought all of that and more from the material world into the digital realm.
• Our workflows consider damage such as tears, folds, loose joints, detached spines or bindings that open less than 90 degrees, and provide solutions for supporting difficult formats such as scrolls, panoramas and oversized items. We control lighting to capture the full color spectrum of the material from the paper tone to the various pigments on the page, and limit light and heat exposure to protect the object.
• Film Scanning: Digitization of transmissive objects is especially demanding, with collections ranging from 35mm slides and microfilm to glass plate negatives, cellulose acetate, and nitrate films. Pixel Acuity has spent the better part of a decade perfecting film scanning workflows that protect fragile or deteriorating film from further damage while they optimize efficiency, fulfill your unique goals, and conform to the highest image quality standards. 
• Our specialists will design advanced digitization workflows that blend seamlessly with your daily operations. Our proprietary workflow software, DT PixelFlow uses artificial intelligence (AI) and other techniques to analyze the images and deliver best-in-class optical character recognition (OCR), facial recognition, and metadata generation so that your stakeholders can easily find what they’re looking for when repurposing assets.
• No need for risk handling, packing, and transporting your fragile, one-of-a-kind items. Wherever your collection is in the world, we’ll bring the team and equipment to you. Learn more about our international capabilities by reading about Pixel Acuity’s recent trip to Estonia.
• Pixel Acuity can produce 130 megapixel images, the highest image quality on the market and more than five times the pixel density now common in Cultural Heritage imaging. Since you’re making the effort to digitize, we make sure the quality stands the test of time — so that you can repurpose it in multiple ways well into the future.
• Our preservation-grade practices meet the highest Cultural Heritage imaging standards, including FADGI, Metamorfoze, and ISO 19264.
• Many of the world’s most respected libraries have trusted Pixel Acuity to digitize their prized collections, no matter their age, condition, size, or shape. Get the full picture by reading our case studies.

COMPLETE END-TO-END SYSTEMS

Industry-Leading Imaging Technology

 

We fully appreciate the importance of blending seamlessly into your institution’s daily operations, and can digitize your artifacts in our own facility, or on your own site if they can’t be moved from their permanent location. Our digitization hardware, and software enabled by artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, are designed to work together smoothly with carefully optimized workflows.

• Purpose-built rapid-capture systems create an ultra-high-resolution digital copy of your collection quickly and systematically. The result: minimize cost and radically shorten the time required for capture.
• Pixel Acuity’s DT PixelFlow software enables our team to make the most of digital assets by extracting, analyzing, and transcribing text using optical character recognition (OCR) and applying artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to provide facial, object, and geographic descriptive metadata information.
• By combining DT Heritage hardware solutions, Pixel Acuity’s artificial intelligence (AI) processing software, and our team’s expertise, we can digitize anything – even deteriorating film or works on paper, and 3D objects like minerals, fossils, plants and animals – at a level of detail you cannot get anywhere else.

MAKE YOUR ASSETS WORK FOR YOU

Preserve and share your one-of-a-kind stories

There is tremendous value in every one of your heritage assets, and digitization unlocks that value. Reimagine the many ways your staff and stakeholders can use your unique heritage assets to generate vast benefits. You can quickly and easily produce retrospectives focusing on an author or genre, or capitalizing on current events. Create ads, social media campaigns, and other brand-building efforts. License images from your collection of unique art or manuscripts to publishers and advertisers. Inspire a director with the historic information to accurately recreate set designs or costumes for the next big remake or sequel. The list is endless.

 

Digitization is the key to mining the full value from unique artifacts in libraries, art and natural history museums, media and entertainment, sports franchises, and many other fields. The beauty of heritage assets is that they are endlessly reusable and ideally suited to the digital and social media age. By digitizing your library’s collection and adding the assets to your content management system you can turn those precious items into new educational value — while you share access to knowledge, ideas and culture with library users everywhere!