JMI acquires state of the art scanner for digitisation unit of its central library
New Delhi: Dr. Zakir Husain Library, Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) has acquired a high value, state of the art overhead scanning device to scale up its highly ambitious Digitization Unit to promote teachinglearning and research in an online format and also to promote the preservation of art, history and culture and a large number of its rarest of the rare manuscripts and other archival documents for posterity.
The digital preservation of these archival documents will not only provide easy accessibility of these resources to our national and international scholars but it will enhance the sphere of academic research.
Made in France, this very high speed scanner has a capacity to scan a page in less than a second. Acquired with the financial support of National Archives of India, Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
This scanner is also installed at top University libraries of the world like John Hopkins
University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Central Florida, The Graduate Institute of
Geneva, National Library of France, Library of Hagen’s University, Germany, Mc Gill
University, Cleveland Art Museum, and National Library of Finland among others.
The scanner comes with features like, Real Time COLOR Preview, Automatic Glass opening,
Electrical Flat and V- Shaped Book Cradle, LED Cold Lighting, Automatic Cropping, Automatic Curvature Correction etc.
Dr. Zakir Husain Library is first among Central Universities of India to have such a modern and efficient digitisation unit in the country. With this unit, Library proposes to undertake the phase wise digitization of historical manuscripts, rare books, old serials, archival newspapers in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and English languages at a larger scale. These centuries old documents will be digitized within the safe premises of the Library by its own staff being trained to this end.
Library also intend to digitize archival items related to Jamia’s history like photographs, private papers of univetsity’s founder and benefactors like Mahatma Gandhi, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Dr Zakir Husain etc. In addition, journals and magazines, news clips related to 100 years old university shall also be digitalized.
It may be noted that Central Library of JMI is already providing access to a large number of eresources to its users from their homes and other remote locations during current lockdown.