One of Germany’s greatest treasuries of books, the Bavarian State Library in Munich, said on Tuesday it had set a robot to work ”reading” the books and storing more than 7,5-million images of the pages in its digital memory.
The device, which uses gentle suction and a breath of air to turn the pages, is to work until 2009, digitising 37 000 German-language books dating from the period 1518 to 1600.
Library officials said the images will then be put on the internet.
A German federal science fund, the DFG, is backing plans by several German libraries to digitise books and create a new virtual library.
The robot, designed by the Treventus company of Vienna, Austria, won a European Union innovation award earlier this year at the CeBIT computing trade fair in Germany. Similar robots have been installed in the United States.
The robot can scan up to 1 500 books an hour, with human staff only having to put each book into position. Library staff say they are confident it will not damage the priceless old books.
The Bavarian library has also entered a partnership with US search-engine company Google to digitise more modern books from its collection. — Sapa-dpa