The digitization of the books entailed a lengthy process. In 1999, the children’s books that had been selected, were put on 35 mm halftone microfilm as part of the Metamorfoze programme. In 2002, the SAB purchased an Agfa Microscanner (type: SR30 IT). This apparatus enabled the SAB to digitize these and other films in greyscale, in a 400 dpi resolution. The colour filming of fourty picture books deserves special mention; this material was also digitized in colour.

Around 40,000 scans were made of double pages of hundreds of books. These scans take up 1200 GB worth of files. These scans were then split up into 80,000 single pages with the assistance of Photoshop. Each individual page has its own (unique) name so as to leave the structure of the original book as intact as possible.