photo originally from akseabird
I’m pretty skeptical when people call anything for sale “revolutionary.” However, a friend sent me this photo which was up on Flickr. It’s a tool called the Bookeye book scanner. It’s a library digitzation product, but if you look at the photo, it’s being used as a tool for the public — or University of Alaska at Anchorage students — to scan documents to PDF, JPG, TIFF or PNG and then save to USB drive, burn them to a CD, ftp them, save them to a network drive or email them to themselves. Their website even has usage stats that shows what people did with the first million pages they scanned. Good data, and it’s broken down by library type which is even more interesting to me, to see the differences in usage patterns. [thanks manuel]
I graduated recently from Drexel, and found a similar machine at Hagerty Library to be *very* useful. Emailing oneself a PDF of a journal article is much more useful, and versatile, than simply photocopying it.
How long until these are in public libraries too?
Would be interesting if this allowed a cataloging option as well – when someone scans something, besides sending a copy to themselves, they could enter basic cataloging info and give the library a digital copy that could be made available to others.
Will try this one last time. I’ve lost my comments a couple of times now, and your captcha is giving me a huge amount of trouble. Stupidly I keep forgetting to copy and paste what I’m typing in here, since this blog also nukes comments when a mistake is made.
We just got some new copiers here which have a usb port and also offer a scan option. I haven’t had a chance to try it, but I like the idea of using something that most people are already familiar with. It might also save some paper as students realize “hey, wait, I can just scan this to a usb drive and not worry about hauling paper around right now”. Of course, I’m not sure how many people will do this at this point. Love the network idea, but I would think that most email accounts wouldn’t be able to handle that many images.
I knew we had gotten some scan units similar to this for a couple of the libraries here at UIUC and from a quick look it seems to be the same unit. I’ll probably take the opportunity to play around with both one of these days. If I do I’ll try to remember to put a review on here about it and compare them with the “normal” copiers as well.