Project “Digital Library and Treasury Hilandar”
The project “Digital Library and Treasury Hilandar” was launched to perpetuate and preserve in digital form the rich heritage of the Hilandar Monastery, which was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988.
The goal of digitization is the long-term preservation and broad access for the scientific processing of Serbian history and culture. The library has 447 historical documents, including medieval charters and charters, 1041 valuable handwritten books and 80 books from the 15th to 17th century in printing technique. In the treasury and the remaining monastery buildings there are about 800 icons and a large number of sacred objects.
Since the monastery is only accessible to a very limited extent, it is all the more important to digitize and make the valuable documents accessible. For this purpose it was important to find a suitable scanner. After a detailed test phase in our offices, the monastery decided to use our WideTEK A2 flatbed scanner. The scanner is particularly suitable for scanning old fonts. Due to the high scanning speed of 3 seconds for the A2 format and the resolution of 300 dpi, old fonts on parchment are particularly protected and are only exposed to light for a very short time. An important factor was also the simple operation of the scanner and the software.
After the scanner was installed and calibrated, a monk was instructed in a one-day training session, after which he carried out the scans of the 447 documents on his own. Currently, several hundred thousand pages are being scanned from the archive.
