Over 20,000 manuscripts, amulets, fragments and some 500,000 archival documents are preserved at the “Matenadaran”, the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts. The digitization of manuscripts is necessary because material cultural values are increasingly outdated, while new technologies enable us to preserve digital images of these values and pass them on to future generations.
One of the main functions of the Matenadaran Digitization Department (set up in 2017) is to digitize medieval manuscripts, archival documents, and also Armenian literature and press collections held in the Matenadaran bookshop.

The Matenadaran Digitization Department owns the following products:

• 2 eScan Open System scanners (since 2016)
• 1 Quartz A1 scanner (since 2013)
• LIMB CAPTURE software for all our scanners

Thanks to the i2S products of the Digitization Department, the Matenadaran has already digitized almost 1,000,000 pages of medieval manuscripts and archival documents. The majority of the images are scanned in jpg format, giving researchers access to the manuscripts and archives. For publishing purposes, miniature images of manuscript pages requiring high quality are scanned in tif format.

Read the testimonial from Ara Gasparyan – Software Engineer at Matenadaran, responsible for automating digitization projects

“Thanks to i2S products, we meet high quality standards for the preservation of original documents. The scanning process is safe, even for fragile parts of a manuscript page or archival document. The operation of the book holder and glass is designed to avoid damaging the scanned object. LIMB CAPTURE software makes calibration and post-processing operations easily accessible, thanks to the scanners’ thoughtful integration into our existing document scanning ecosystem. The SupraScan Quartz A1 is capable of scanning glossy or non-planar manuscript bindings thanks to the scanner’s lighting modes. In particular, the “glare control” mode is very useful for controlling reflections. Last but not least, the i2S support team was very responsive and helped us discover many of the product’s features.”

Jamia Millia Islamia University

The digitization unit aims to promote teaching-learning and research in an online digital format, and to preserve art, culture and history as well as many of its “rarest manuscripts” and other archival documents for future generations.