Some research requires that the exact text of a short passage be collected for later use. Traditionally a user might make a photocopy of the relevant page, but this makes the user reliant on the availability of copy machines. In addition, this material remains in print, and is not available for immediate use electronically.

 

Portable Scanner

One tool which students may wish to investigate is a portable scanner. These small battery powered devices can be easily carried in a small bag, or even a pocket in some cases, making them highly portable. Some scanners act like a pen, while others involve dragging a wand steadily down the page. Some of these scanners have on-the-fly optical character recognition software built in to the device. This allows it to store text rather than graphics, permitting direct transfer of text to a computer or PDA, rather than a graphical image of the text.

  • Provides excellent way of capturing small amounts of text for later reference
  • OCR functionality is useful, allowing quoted bits of text to be downloaded directly to the computer.
  • Some additional functionality is found in some scanners, such as dictionary or foreign language applications.
  • Portable scanners require steady movement down the page in order to get a good scan. This takes practice.
  • The page needs to lay pretty flat in order to be scanned. This may be a problem in tightly bound volumes.
  • Scanner price may be too expensive for occasional use.

Street Price: $100-$200, based on brand and features

Review: C-Pen 800c review at Kurt’s Karnevale
http://members.cox.net/seerkb/cpen800c.htm

 

Digital Cameras

Some information you may come across in your research will be visual in nature. In such cases, a digital camera can be invaluable in capturing this data. If you plan to make use of a digital camera in the field for capturing visual data from books, you should test it in the store to check for a small minimum focusing distance or macro capabilities. These will help to ensure that you can make the content visible in the final print.

In addition to capturing visual data from books, digital cameras can be used to document a specific range of shelves for later browsing, capture the spine of a book for easy identification and many other similar tasks.

 

In many cases, online article indexes offer the user the ability to send citations and/or full-text articles via email, but this is not always possible or practical. Saving the information to portable storage is frequently a good option, especially when compared to paying for printer use at a public terminal. Floppy drives are slowly being abandoned on new computers due to the popularity of network based storage and other media.

USB Flash Drives


Over the past two years, USB flash memory storage has become extremely popular. Prices for flash memory of all types have dropped precipitously during 2004, making these devices affordable. All that is required to use these devices is an available USB port on a computer. Some USB flash drives support the faster USB 2.0 protocol (compared to the venerable USB 1.1), which makes copying large files an order of magnitude less time consuming. Some libraries and other terminals may use computer based security to “lock down” terminals, making these USB devices impossible to access, even though they are physically plugged in to the computer.

  • Small and lightweight
  • Wide compatibility
  • Security measures may lock out USB storage devices
  • Many models are somewhat fragile
  • Cap over USB plug easily lost in some models

Street Price: 256MB ~ $30, 512MB ~ $50, 1GB ~ $80

Review: Comparative Review of USB storage devices at Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/004/flash/flash-1.html


Portable Hard Drives

When it is necessary to save large quantities of information in the field, flash memory drives will not suffice. This is particularly important when working with audio, image or video files, which consume large quantities of storage space. For example, One hour of video compressed with the MPEG-2 standard (the form of compression used in DVD’s) could easily use 2.5 or more gigabytes of storage space.

In such cases, the most practical form of storage comes in the form of a portable hard drive. While there are off-the-shelf solutions for portable hard drives, I would advocate the use of a 2.5” notebook drive and a USB 2.0 or Firewire enclosure. They are simple and inexpensive to assemble.

  • Very inexpensive per MB of storage
  • Easy to assemble in most cases
  • More fragile than flash memory storage
  • Security measures may disable these devices
  • Susceptible to loss of data from strong magnetic fields
  • Larger and heavier than flash memory devices
  • Must carry around a cable too

Street Price: USB2 Enclosure ($30), 20 GB notebook drive ($70)

Review: Bytecc Hotdrive 2.5 enclosure review by TechTastic.ca
http://www.techtastic.ca/reviews3/hotdrive.html