New Elarscan receives the blessing of the University of Divinity, Melbourne

Employees of Mannix Library at Catholic Theological College in East Melbourne, greatly appreciate their new universal scanner ElarScan A2, noting its versatility and convenience, and its ability to carefully scan valuable originals. In February 2019, Elarscan was installed in the library’s Special Collections Room and began to be used for digitizing rare books, folios, and other unique materials.

"The library staff have been very impressed with our new Elarscan A2 scanner," says Ms Kerrie Burn, manager of the Mannix library, - and it has taken pride of place in our new Special Collections Room, which was officially launched in February 2019. Over the past couple of years, the library has been focussing on the development of its special collections. We needed to digitize them to be able to better showcase these materials and ensure that they were more accessible for potential researchers. Our old technology, while suitable for scanning general documents, was not appropriate for use with rare and fragile materials. In addition, the new scanner has made it possible to digitize much larger items which wouldn’t have been possible before.

We are now able to scan a variety of different types of items, from rare books to antiquarian coins. One of our favourite features has been perspective correction, which enables us to scan any tightly bound older books, opening them to just 90 degrees. We also are pleased that it has inbuilt OCR functionality and look forward to making more use of this” - says Kerrie.

Since 2017, in Australia and New Zealand, Elarscan universal planetary scanners www.elarscan.com.au has been represented by Inotec Pty Ltd https://inotec.com.au/, a highly regarded company with a strong reputation among scanning professionals. The company provided installation of the scanner on site, conducted training of employees, and provides priority technical support and consulting.

"We saw several different scanners demonstrated at other institutions before we made the purchase decision. Most of these models were way out of our price range. However, we have discovered that Elarscan has all of the features that we require at a price that we could afford. " - comments Kerrie. " We are still experimenting with what might be possible and which of our digitization projects will be prioritized. However, the installation of the scanner is essential to all of our future digitization initiatives at the University of Divinity. We are very happy with our purchase and look forward to all of the digitization projects that it will facilitate at our institution." - Kerrie concluded.

Founded in 1910, the University of Divinity (https://divinity.edu.au) today consists of eleven theological colleges representing eight Christian denominations. It is the world's oldest ecumenical degree-granting consortium. Each College of the University is a unique educational community and is supported by a wide range of churches and religious orders, that together resource the University as a whole.

Mannix Library (http://www.mannix.org.au) supports education and research at Catholic Theological College and the wider University in the fields of biblical studies, theology, philosophy, church history, pastoral studies and a number of related disciplines, with an emphasis on the Catholic tradition. The library provides access to more than 130,000 print and 150,000 electronic books and journal volumes.