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Preservation Services : At a glance : Bethlehem center

Preservation Service Centers: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

OCLC's main Preservation Service Center, based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1985 as MAPS (Mid-Atlantic Preservation Service) by a consortium of research libraries. The state-of-the-art facility, with a highly skilled and experienced staff with an average of 9.5 years of service, has been a consistent leader in reformatting a diverse array of library and archive materials.

The Bethlehem center operates two studios - one for microfilming and the other for digital imaging. The microfilm studio houses 12 Herrmann & Kraemer cameras and can produce millions of frames per year.

The scanning studio uses SunRise and NextScan microfilm scanners and Zeutschel, Fujitsu, Microtek, and BetterLight direct scanners for image capture and processing. Superior image capture from original material is accomplished by using planetary as well as flat-bed scanners and digital cameras.

Some of the unique services offered by the Bethlehem center are:

  • Oversize materials processing
    The Bethlehem facility has the latest technologies for filming and scanning oversized materials, including:
    • Custom book cradles that accommodate bound materials with a height up to 29 inches, open-book width of 51 inches, and thickness of 3.5 inches.
    • Zeiss lenses on the Herrmann & Kraemer (H & K) microfilm cameras that capture resolutions of 100+ line pairs-per-millimeter at most reductions, even those above 24x. Large-scale engineering, architectural drawings, blueprints, and maps are filmed on an oversized flat-bed camera.
    • A BetterLight 8K digital camera can capture high-quality color images from a variety of oversized material, such as geological maps or poster collections.
  • Specialized language support
    Our technical staff is trained to recognize and follow non-Arabic numbering systems and to understand non-Western printing practices, ensuring the proper filming or scanning order and orientation for materials. Staff members are experienced in a variety of languages including:
    • Western languages in Roman alphabets
    • Languages using the Cyrillic alphabet
    • Slavic and Middle Eastern (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi)
    • East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
    • South Asian (Hindi and Urdu)
    • Southeast Asian (Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Javanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Thai and Vietnamese)