The single most popular piece of equipment that we have purchased in the last year has been a digital sender. Ours is from Hewlett-Packard (an HP 9100), although there are others on the market. Faculty that have never before darkened our threshold have found their way into the faculty media lab, scanned a stack of paper, and declared this the greatest computing invention in their life times.

The digital sender will take b&w, color, single or double-sided paper, and has a flatbed scanner as well as a document feeder. There is a simple keypad on which you type in the FROM and TO email addresses. Most of the .pdfs are posted on our course management system and people simply email them to themselves. A secondary use has been for OCR (and newer models have OCR capability built in). The quality of the scan is excellent, and it's fast.