About Emerging Technologies Team
The Emerging Technologies Team (ETT) is a group of Stanford University Libraries (SUL) technology and library staff who regularly work with new and emerging technologies. Our goal is to identify, test, and assess new and emerging technologies within the academic library environment and disseminate that information to our colleagues… more
Twenty years ago, 30 April 1993, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web site at CERN. At the same time, he released the code that defined the Web, the first version of HTML, free for the world to use to create a new communications medium.
Last year the Emerging Technologies Team investigated 3D printing to learn how SUL could best support this new technology. Successful 3D printing begins with a design phase, often requiring complicated CAD software with a steep learning curve. While many of our engineering students are familiar with applications such as Solidworks for 3D design (which SUL now provides on all of its library cluster computers), the spread of this technology into non-technical fields arguably requires a simpler way to design printable objects.
There are many pen scanners on the market that use OCR to convert images to text, but only a few are able to recognize non-Latin scripts (such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic) or languages that use diacritics (such as French, Polish, and German.) We tested two such pen scanners: the PenPower 
The ScanSnap is a document scanner connected directly to a network, allowing users to digitize and email documents quickly and easily to one or many recipients. The output resolution is high quality, and the scanner is capable of scanning double-sided documents without re-feeding the original. The touchscreen interface makes typing email addresses a bit time consuming, but the ScanSnap retains email addresses once they have been input.
ETT Feed