Musical scores and manuscripts are essential resources for music theory research. Those precious documents can be a challenge for special librarians.
Conductor copies of musical scores are typically rich in handwritten annotations. Ongoing archival efforts to digitize orchestral conductors’ scores have made scanned copies of hundreds of these annotated scores available in digital formats.
It is paramount to digitize those music collections with the adequate scanner.
In i2S, overhead scanners are mainly made to digitize rare and fragile documents like manuscripts and books.
Some clients have specific books that they would like to digitize such as music books.
For example, Mc Gill University, in Montreal, Canada, had acquired a Suprascan Quartz A0 HD that “really put it to the test. Indeed, “music scores require a minimum of 600 dpi resolution to capture the finest details such as music lifts and characters. With an optical resolution between 600 & 1000 dpi, this machine is ideal for scanning music scores.”
Below the complete video of McGill about their digitization project.