Northwestern State University’s libraries have recently added Knowledge Imaging Center walk up scanners for use by anyone in the library. The scanners are in Watson Library on Northwestern State’s Natchitoches campus along with the libraries on the Leesville-Fort Polk campus and at the Nursing Education Center in Shreveport, according to Director of Libraries Abbie Landry.

According to Landry, the scanners were obtained through a Student Technology Fee grant submitted by Gil Gilson, assistant for support services, at Northwestern State’s Nursing Education Center in Shreveport. The scanners use interactive touch screen technology so users can scan books, journal articles, notes, pages and pictures and save the images to a USB flash drive which can be plugged directly into the unit.

Ease of use and versatility allow users to scan in color, black and white and gray scale and save images as PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, or rich text. Users can modify images by cropping, enlarging or changing resolution. They can save the images to USB flash drive for us in presentations, power point, posters, etc. The directions and commands are on touch screens connected to the scanners. This service is free to all library users.