OpticBook 4600

The UNIVERISTY OF KANSAS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

ON SALINA CAMPUS GOES GREEN WITH HELP FROM PLUSTEK’S ST BOOKSCAN CENTER

Plustek Helps Medical Campus achieve its Goal to Go Digital

The University of Kansas School of Medicine-Salina opened in July 2011 as an innovative medical education program designed to address the shortage of rural doctors in the United States. The goal of the program is to attract medical students with a strong interest in practicing rural medicine and encourage them to stay and build their own practices in rural areas after earning their degrees and completing their residencies. The new campus’ curriculum is tied to the classroom offerings at the KU Medical Center’s campuses in Kansas City and Wichita. The learning process relies heavily on video-conferencing, with students in Salina participating in lectures with their peers in other cities and receiving many of their lectures via podcast.

To keep the program functioning at its highest potential, Salina campus leaders decided that the best way to streamline costs was to go green by using products such as scanners that are more cost-effective than printers and reduce paper waste.

School administrators reviewed their options and were leaning toward a large and expensive book scanner that had been used with great success on another campus. Before deciding on purchasing it, they were introduced to Plustek’s ST BookScan Center, which offered features similar to the larger scanner but was more cost-effective. Because of its size and price point, KU School of Medicine-Salina administrators opted for the ST BookScan Center. They believed the ST BookScan Center was a good match for the school’s highly computerized curriculum. School administrators believe the medical students will find it more suited to the electronic delivery of course materials than a traditional copier. 2

“We’re hosting a new generation of students who are much more comfortable and tech-savvy than ever before, so I’m sure they will think of endless ways to use the scanner in ways we haven’t even discovered,” said Lucy Kolhoff, senior coordinator, KU School of Medicine, Salina campus. “Because of the distance from the main school, our campus uses digital methods of communication, so the ST BookScan Center works well with what we’ve been trying to create, which is a highly accessible place to learn and retrieve information quickly.”

Currently, Kolhoff is using the ST BookScan Center for archiving and digitizing documents that are easily sent to the main campus. The scanner is located in an accessible spot that allows medical students to readily scan library materials to thumb drives and emails as well. Kolhoff believes that the Plustek ST BookScan Center would be ideal for businesses and educational facilities that rely heavily on paper and toner but want to go green. Kolhoff said that its user-friendly software made the ST BookScan Center simple to understand and easy to use.

An ideal alternative to the copier, the Plustek ST BookScan Center can scan books and large format documents to a USB flash drive, shared network folder, FTP site, email address or even a printer. The system is easy to use and does not require user training. Prompts on the touch screen display guide users through the scanning process and enable them to save books, bound materials and documents in a variety of formats including searchable PDF. The ST BookScan Center was created based on the concept of book preservation, digitization of content and sharing of the book electronically. It can scan up to A3 size page (12” x 17”) in just 2.4 seconds. Thanks to Plustek’s patent pending SEE technology, spine shadows and distortions are eliminated and thick books are scanned without unbinding or dismantling making it a perfect solution for digitizing precious and valuable books and documents. The optional coin-op/card-op payment system can be added for organizations that want to generate revenue from the use of the system. 

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