• Creates electronic backups of important letters and other documents that can be stored separately from the paper originals.

• Creates electronic images of original paper documents that can serve as substitutes allowing originals to be discarded.

• Saves physical space - Convert boxes, files, file cabinets, and drawers of paper documents into comparatively compact CD's which can free up file cabinet space and floor space.

• More than one person can have access to the same document (electronic) at the same time.

• Electronic documents can be easily and quickly distributed to multiple individuals at various locations.

• Converts paper documents such as letters, scientific papers, brochures, booklets, photos, charts/diagrams, and historic documents into electronic format for posting to web sites.

• Creates portable and conveniently accessible documents. A large number of electronic documents can be transported on a laptop computer and/or on CDs.

Description of Services:

Missouri S&T Printing Services offers high-speed scanning in black and white as well as color at resolutions of 200 x 200 dpi, 300 x 300 dpi, and 600 x 600 dpi. The resulting electronic files are in industry standard portable document format (pdf) and can be read using Adobe Acrobat Reader which is available at no charge.

The prices charged are based on the resolution requested, whether the scans are in black/white or color, the number of originals, the number of CDs needed, the number of resulting electronic files, and the level of effort* necessary to prepare the documents for scanning. Contact Printing Services at 4264 for an estimate or more information.

For a simple text document, 200 x 200 dpi resolution may be satisfactory while documents where high quality scans of photos are needed, 600 x 600 dpi may be desirable. Higher resolution scans result in significantly larger electronic files. For example, a test scan of 65 original pages of b/w documents with fairly uniform content and no photos resulted in a file size of 9 MB when scanned at 200 x 200 dpi and 17 MB when scanned at 300 x 300 dpi.

The customer may request specific file names for the resulting electronic files in order to facilitate future efforts to locate documents in those files. The files may be, depending on size, able to be sent via email to customers thus saving the cost of CDs.

*Description of levels of effort:

Light- Documents are ready for scanning with little effort required

Intermediate - Documents require some preparation due to various sizes and weights of paper, curled or folded pages, rubber bands to remove and reapply, etc.

Heavy - Substantial effort required due to paper clips, staples, binder clips, mixed size and weight of paper originals, bound materials or other conditions that required individual hand feeds on glass

Note:Customers can reduce the cost of scans by choosing a lower resolution and preparing the documents for scanning by removing paper clips, staples, etc.