Technical and commercial viability analysis of a portable low-cost machine to digitize very large historical documents aiming on long-term preservation and knowledge democratization

• Grant number: 18/22384-9
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Innovative Research in Small Business - PIPE
• Start date: November 01, 2019
• End date: July 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Mechanical Engineering - Mechanical Engineering Design
• Principal Investigator: Roberto Fray da Silva
• Grantee: Roberto Fray da Silva
• Company: Vulcano Equipamentos para Digitalização Ltda
• CNAE: Fabricação de equipamentos de informática ; Fabricação de equipamentos e instrumentos ópticos, fotográficos e cinematográficos ; Atividades de bibliotecas e arquivos
• Pesquisadores principais: Fernando Hattori

Abstract

The digitization of historical documents collections is increasing its importance due to several factors, related to hardware, software and operational procedures (MARTINS, RODRIGUES, NUNES, 2008; LYNCH, 2003; SILVA et al, 2017). The main benefits of digitizing those documents are: (i) greater accessibility and content democratization; (ii) reduction in the need to handle the original documents. The digitization of those documents is complex due to their fragility and the variety of types and formats. These are an important source of information related to places in a specific point in time, language and terms used when they were produced, and to allow the extraction of spatial relation between places (SCHONEBERG; SCHMIDT; HOHN, 2013).Examples of institutions that have collections of these types of documents are museums, architecture and engineering faculties, archives, libraries, water and energy distribution companies, among others. Nevertheless, a considerable part of those documents have dimensions that are bigger than the A1 format (59,4 cm x 84,1 cm). Those present problems when being digitized with the current available equipments. Those equipments can cost more than R$700.000 and, in many cases, do not provide results with satisfactory quality. The objective of this project is to develop hardware, software, and operational procedures that will allow for the high quality digitization of fragile large dimension documents, with low cost and in less time. We estimate the market potential to be at least R$6.54 million on São Paulo State alone, considering both selling the hardware and providing digitization services with partnering companies. (AU)