“Hankow was an early Treaty Port in central China where Wuhan is,” says University Librarian Dr. Anthony Ferguson speaking to ACCESS. “The British founded the Hankow Club in 1878 to provide amenities to the foreign communities in Hankow. The Hankow Club Library contained recreational reading and other materials, but it was foremost a collection about China for foreigners living in and visiting the Treaty Port. When the Treaty Port system started to fall apart and Westerners began to disperse, the need for the collection declined. At that time, in the late 1920s, the Hankow Club decided to sell it. The ‘China’ collection was purchased by the University of Hong Kong for HKD25,000 in 1932. It’s a fine collection of nearly 3,000 volumes.”

The Morrison Collection was from Guangzhou. It was formerly the library of the Morrison Education Society set up in 1836 in Guangzhou to further the work of Rev. Robert Morrison (1782-1834), the first Protestant missionary in China. It consists of 1,284 titles in 2,726 volumes collected by the Society and Robert Morrison himself. The collection found its way to the City Hall Library of Hong Kong in 1869 until being transferred to the University of Hong Kong in 1913. No books were added to the collection after 1869.

A third collection, the Chater Collection, owned by a prominent businessman in early Hong Kong, will also be digitized. It was presented to the university by Sir Cecil Clementi, Governor of Hong Kong from 1925 to 1930, in 1927.

“Our collection of rare books on China in Western languages is rather unique in this part of the world,” noted Dr. Y.C. Wan who oversees the digitization project. “We need to exploit the full value of this collection by both scanning and producing fully useable e-books as rapidly and inexpensively as possible.”

Scanning of the three rare book collections started in July 2008. When finished, it will have produced 4,000 e-books, about 1,200,000 images, in 12 months. In addition to preserving these rare books and improving access to them, they will also support teaching and research and enhance HKUL’s role as a digital content provider.

In order to begin the transformation from hardcopy to e-books, HKUL became the first university library in Asia to use the Kirtas AP 2400 system. HKUL’s technology partner is the iGroup.

The APT 2400 uses two high resolution digital cameras to produce superior, full colour digital images. Its unique robotic technology uses airflow to gently separate and turn pages. The robotic vacuum head contains the Page Edge Sensor that detects if more than one page or no page is lifted. If intervention is needed, the operator is signalled to take corrective action.

Dr. Ferguson continued, “Images for each book are sent to iGroup in Thailand where they have the expertise to clean them up so that the blotches, stains and particles which come with old books are removed electronically giving nice clean images. Because they are electronic images they can then be used for OCR to create full text searchable e-books.”

Previously, HKUL attempted an in-house operation to scan rare books, but the results led them to conclude that it was not an efficient or cost-effective way to tackle mass digitization “Technically, the Kirtas system provides a total solution to our scanning of rare books and the production of their digital counterparts,” says Dr. Wan.

Once the collections are digitized, HKUL will create print equivalents for the open stacks. HKUL may also add the e-books to international lists, like those held by Amazon, so that print on demand can be offered to all.

In addition to English language titles, HKUL has a lot of rare materials in Chinese including Song era editions. “We want to scan them to provide greater access for library users and others around the world,” says Dr. Ferguson. “The question of being able to OCR these Chinese character texts is a difficult one. Progress has been made in Taiwan, and iGroup has indicated they are interested in experimenting with these advances in Chinese character OCR processing. But even if we cannot OCR the entire text of these books, we still hope to scan them.”

With the experience it gains from scanning its collections, HKUL will have technical and managerial skills to share with others. “The University has not made a final decision that this equipment will be used to do work for other universities,” says Dr. Ferguson. “However, it is our intention, to explore this seriously with the other seven universities in Hong Kong in order to do scanning work for them.”

The University of Hong Kong was founded in 1912, making it the oldest tertiary education institution in Hong Kong. The HKUL website is here.

Kirtas Technologies has pioneered and perfected the technology for highest quality, high-speed, non-destructive mass book digitization. The company’s technology redefines digitization of bound documents, delivering gentle handling, the highest image quality, speed and fewer errors than other solutions. It is headquartered in Victor, New York. Visit Kirtas Technologies (http://www.kirtas.com) for more information.