The Department of Special Collections & University Archives at The University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library has a new member of the team: a powerful book-scanning robot that can photograph up to 2,500 pages per hour. The device helps librarians preserve and protect the priceless rare books in the stacks while allowing easy and up-close access to those materials for UTulsa students as well as scholars from around the world.
“Researchers seek and expect materials to be available online to access and to view, and by providing them with as much as we can, we are fulfilling our mission as a scholarly information resource,” said Melissa Kunz, department director. “In archives world, we say, ‘Scan once, use many times.’ By scanning a rare book and making those images available digitally, we can decrease the amount of mechanical handling that fragile materials receive. That prolongs their life, ensuring that future generations can continue to enjoy them.”
Digitization, Kunz said, has long been a priority at academic libraries, which regularly scan and make texts like the Gutenberg Bible, the Nuremberg Chronicle, and the early bound works of William Shakespeare available for free through open access. “The big advantage there is that scholars benefit from an intensive level of research anytime they choose from wherever they are. They can zoom in on high-resolution images for finer detail and even compare copies between institutions.” With whole scholarly fields devoted to studying and analyzing what makes copies of books unique, that visual comparison in the digital environment is a critical plus.
UTulsa is no stranger to digitizing archival materials. “We’ve been scanning our archives for over 25 years,” Kunz continued. Special Collections staff have employed a variety of tools and techniques to digitize materials, starting with simple book cradles and cameras, and progressing to top-down document cameras. They began a search two years ago for equipment that would advance the department, both in the physical scanning process and what could be done with the images to make them available for patrons.
The Treventus ScanRobot 2.0 intrigued library staff. Manufactured in Austria, it’s meant to scan books quickly, efficiently, and safely. It uses an air system for handling books, even fragile materials. “That was the main draw for us, its ability to handle items so carefully,” said Kunz.
The scanner’s camera unit extends down into the center margin, or gutter, of the book, where small holes in the triangular plate create a vacuum that gently pulls pages to either side of the camera prism. As the camera unit moves up, it captures the lines of text and images inside the book. When the camera reaches the top of its range, the vacuum turns off, the pages drop back toward the cradle, and air nozzles turn the page with a puff of air before the process continues. ScanRobot also comes with a set of optical sensors and lasers that detect when a book isn’t fully seated in the cradle or if the air system is turning more than one page at a time.
“Our rare books cataloger, Brandis Malone, and I spent a full week being trained in how to use the ScanRobot, to understand all the nuances of its many settings, and became certified operators,” said Kunz. “The ScanRobot is an automatic book scanner with a set of safety features, but it’s our job as the operators to ensure the ongoing safety of our books, so we’re always at the control panel, ready to make changes or stop scanning.”
In bringing this device to Special Collections, UTulsa joins a prestigious group of libraries and institutions with their own ScanRobot. That includes the Library of Congress, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Sydney, and photography and imaging experts like Getty Research Institute and the Canon Corp. “We learned that The University of Tulsa has the only ScanRobot in the central United States,” Kunz said.
Scanning the books is really the first step in scholarly access. “It’s what happens after that things really get going,” she said. In 2024, McFarlin Library joined HathiTrust, a digital consortium of academic libraries with partners like Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and others, gaining access to more than 17 million digitized books provided by those institutions.
“We worked closely with the Treventus programmers to develop a workflow so that once a book is fully scanned, the ScanRobot adds optical character recognition text for searchability and then automatically packages the images so we can submit them to HathiTrust,” said Kunz. “This is really us taking our seat at the table when it comes to digitization and promoting our collections. We want to be an active participant and contributor to the HathiTrust repository. Our assessments show that around 64,000 of our books are out of copyright and could be scanned and uploaded, and more books join the public domain every year. There will always be books to make available for our students and scholars.”
Special Collections has plenty of other plans for the ScanRobot. “We’ll be working with the Modernist Journals Project to rescan many of the early 20th-century periodicals from our shelves that students and scholars use in Modernist literature courses,” she said. The ScanRobot will also be used to digitize materials in the University Archives that have never been scanned, such as historical theses, dissertations, and course bulletins, with those texts eventually being uploaded to a digital collections site that McFarlin librarians are working to implement this year.
“We’ve been over the moon with what this machine can do in such a short amount of time,” Kunz said. “University administrators like Provost George Justice gave enthusiastic support for this purchase, and generous contributions from members of the Henneke Society were instrumental in helping us achieve this huge leap forward in digitization and access for scholars.”