Submitted by Edwin A. Holtum
Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
As a curator of rare medical books, I've been interested in efforts to simulate the "look and feel" (well, at least the "look") of the wonderful volumes in our collection. The internet reveals thousands of beautiful digital images of individual pages of rare and historic medical works but these two-dimensional images, by their very nature, fail to capture the delight we find in viewing books as objects composed of many moving parts. While nothing can match the encounter of physically handling a book, there have been some attempts to simulate the experience through computer animation. The most notable of these is NLM's magnificent project Turning the Pages Online that allows users to view the contents of five selected works by "turning" of the leaves of the books. Complete with audio narration, zoom capabilities, and high-end graphics, the project constitutes the "gold standard" for online book browsing. However, the cost of this project is well beyond the means of most medical libraries.
The good news is that for the rest of us, a "poor man's" version of book animation can be put together using inexpensive off the shelf software a digital camera, and simple photo-processing software. PageAuthor (available for approximately $140) is designed primarily for creating web-based advertising pamphlets. Using the product's built-in "page-turning" feature, it's a relatively simple process to snap a digital image of an open book and paste it into the PageAuthor template. By packaging a series of these images, it's possible to create a virtual book the pages of which can be "turned" by mouse-clicks, revealing entire or selected contents of a chosen work. The animation can be used in presentations or made available on the web. I'm happy to send more detailed instructions and some sample files for anyone wishing to try the technique.