Recently, the UCR Library’s Cyberinfrastructure team updated the public Zeta book scanners with new software and upgraded touchscreens.

Now, library users will find that making scans is faster and easier than ever before. The new touchscreens have a larger display area and clearer controls, making navigation more efficient.

The updated Scannx software provides a powerful, easy-to-use solution for patrons to scan books, documents, and photos. It can scan, store, and send digitized content as searchable PDF files to Dropbox, Google Drive, email, smartphones, and tablets, as well as to local USB drives or printers.

There is also a new Scan-to-MP3 feature that lets users convert text documents into audio files, so students can listen to the text of the document. The Zeta scanner performs optical character recognition (ocr) on written text and then produces an MP3 file of a voice reading the document. This feature not only improves the accessibility of scanned documents, but makes them more portable so students can listen to them “on the go.” Additionally, this new output format upholds the library’s core value of inclusion by creating equitable access to resources for all patrons.