Update on Scanners for Electronic Document Delivery
By Sylvia Merino, M.B.A., M.P.H.
Head, Learning Resources Division
UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library
[Editor's Note: This article updates two previous articles by Sylvia Merino: The Quick Guide to Electronic Document Delivery: From Paper to PDF, published in Latitudes, May/June 2002 and Electronic Document Delivery: Technology Update, published in Latitudes, March/April 2003.]
As with most things in the electronic world, the price of scanners has gone down while quality and features have gone up. With a wider choice of scanners within your price range, what are the features to consider in a scanner suitable for library work?
Don't settle for the slower type of scanner connections, such as parallel or even standard USB. Go for a "hi-speed USB 2.0" scanner. FireWire (also known as IEEE 1394) and SCSI are also fast connection types, but most computers do not come with FireWire or SCSI ports and you must go through extra effort to install them yourself, whereas one or more USB ports are always included on a modern PC. Compared to just a year ago, there are many more USB 2.0 scanners to choose from, and you can find at least one from each of the major scanner manufacturers. USB 2.0 is backwards compatible with USB 1.0 so a hi-speed scanner can be used even on a computer that has only a standard USB 1.0 port, although it won't operate at hi-speed. Just make sure that your computer has a functional USB port; in other words, that it has the physical port AND that the operating system of your computer is one that supports USB. Generally, this means that your computer should have any Windows operating system except 95 or NT. Some computers with the 98 operating system may have USB problems, although the more up-to-date 98SE usually seems to work okay with USB devices. Always check the list of operating systems which are supported by the scanner you want to purchase. If you have a technical support department at your organization I highly recommend you ask them for help determining if a particular scanner make and model will be compatible with your workplace computer. Be particularly careful if you have a new computer with the XP operating system; I found that my barely 2-year old HP scanner which I wanted to move from one computer to my new work computer did NOT have updated drivers to allow guaranteed compatibility with my new XP machine. It may be that, with lower prices for scanners, manufacturers will not be motivated to put in the extra time and expense to update drivers so that their older scanner models achieve compatibility with newer operating systems.
Once a very expensive option, it is now possible to get a scanner bundled with an automatic document feeder (ADF) for less than $200 -- a price that won't break the bank. This can be an important accessory if you are scanning loose papers as it will save you the time of laboriously placing each sheet of paper on the bed of the scanner. Note, however, that the bulky ADF does nothing at all for you if you are mainly scanning pages from books or journals. In fact, the bulkier lid may get in the way and it also adds one more complicated part to the scanner that may fail. However, if you do want the convenience of the ADF, one scanner maker to check out with some of the lowest priced scanner/ADF bundles is Microtek. I recently purchased one for scanning bills at home and I went with Microtek rather than my old standby, HP, because of the low cost ADF bundle. I was impressed by the user-friendly Microtek ScanWizard which made if easy to operate the ADF and to get very good PDFs without resorting to the manual to look up any scanner technical jargon. I found the basic Microtek ScanWizard interface much easier to understand than the HP PrecisionScan.
Third-party software bundles sold with scanners have also gotten better and it is possible to purchase a scanner that comes with PDF-capable software included. In other words, you could avoid the purchase of separate Adobe Acrobat software if you choose your scanner with careful attention to the software that comes bundled with the scanner. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my new scanner came with two different products that provided me with basic PDF-making ability: Adobe Photoshop Album and Adobe PhotoDeluxe. The PhotoDeluxe product has been discontinued, but Photoshop Elements is Adobe's new mid-level product for image editing. It has the same basic PDF-making capabilities as PhotoDeluxe. You can still purchase the full-blown Adobe Acrobat if you want all the bells and whistles it provides, such as the ability to build a search index for your PDF and to create bookmarks and links, etc. But if all you want to do is scan a journal article into a plain vanilla PDF suitable for an email attachment, almost any of the recent versions of Adobe imaging products will serve you well enough.
Lastly, a frequent question asked by those shopping for a new scanner is the meaning of specifications such as 2400 x 4800. The lower number of the two represents the actual optical (hardware) capability of the scanner and is more important than the larger (software) number. Personally, with scanner prices as low as they are, I wouldn't settle for anything less than a scanner with 2400 optical resolution which will allow for very decent document and image scanning. I could launch into a more detailed explanation here but I would prefer to guide you to a really helpful web site devoted to teaching the basics on understanding how scanners operate. Written by Wayne Fulton, his "Scanning Basics 101" site covers almost everything you might want to know regarding scanners. Another reason to visit his web site is that you'll find some of the lowest prices on ScanSoft OCR software I have seen on the web: http://www.scantips.com.
Besides ScanSoft, note that the other major OCR software product is the Abbyy FineReader. Depending on exactly what features you need from your OCR software it's a toss-up as to which will serve you better, OmniPage Pro or Abbyy FineReader. Both programs are capable of giving you over 98% accuracy, a vast improvement over the days when you were lucky to get 65% accuracy and had to spend way too much time fixing errors in a scanned document. Why would you need OCR software? It probably isn't necessary to use OCR when scanning journal articles to PDF since all you need for a good readable PDF is the "image" format. But what if you had a report that was handed out at a conference and wanted to quote lengthy passages from it in a newsletter or email to a group of co-workers? You could save yourself the time of re-typing the passages by scanning and OCR'ing the text to capture the characters of the original paper report.
While you peruse the "Scanning Basics 101" site, check out the articles on the PaperPort software by ScanSoft. If you want to try to organize your stacks of papers at work and go the route of the "paperless office", then you'll be glad to know that PaperPort is now using PDF rather than the proprietary PaperPort format that was formerly used. This is the one thing that prevented me from going with the PaperPort product in the past, but I just might have to take a closer look at them again. Naturally, I would prefer to use PDF rather than a proprietary format to avoid worries about future compatibility issues for my archived work documents. I trust that PDF is going to be the preferred format for document sharing for quite some time before we have to worry about up-converting to another future format.