Published Books & Thesis

We use bespoke book cradles, high-resolution flatbed scanners and a range of high-resolution cameras, offering non-contact capture of your published books and thesis. Our equipment can capture single page or double-page spreads creating output formats in TIFF, JPEG (JPEG2000), PDF (PDFA) or any other industry-standard image format you may require. We can also create further surrogate files, such as OCR’d multi-page PDFs, MS Word and eBooks.

All files are captured by our highly trained digitisation technicians using overhead, daylight balanced, non-heat producing lighting, before undergoing a formal quality assurance checking procedure. The final step in the process is the delivery of your electronic files by hard drive.

As standard, TWA survey all material prior to any digitisation project being carried out to ensure that it can withstand the scanning process. If there is evidence of fragility, brittleness, and/or mould, or any other signs of damage, such as pages being stuck together, then recommendations will be made for how to repair and stabilise the content appropriately.

There are many things that need to be taken into consideration when costing your digitisation project, such as:

• Fragility
• The scale of the collection
• Whether items are contained in sleeves
• Whether photographs need to be cleaned

Consequently, it’s impossible to give a definitive answer as to cost, but you can get a rough estimate using our digitisation quote calculator below.

Binding can cause a challenge for any bound book, causing curvature along the gutter between the pages, distorting scans and casting shadows. The thicker the volume the bigger the issue, impacting on any plans you might have to carry out Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the future.