I have found some crucial shortcuts in my academic work with document prepping which I have little doubt will help me as I continue to do my research.  These are not shortcuts that everyone can do, but if you have the resources you may want to consider them.First, when I check out a book from the library it may be the case that I see a good chapter which I may need to consult in the future.  Photocopying is one avenue, but I prefer to go paperless, and so I use the copier's scanning function.  It is incredibly fast (less than a second per page) because it is a high-end, departmental copier, and it also has a function whereby it emails me the pages when I am done.  I'm not sure if they have these kinds of scanners/copiers at places like Kinkos, but they are incredibly useful.Next, I need to prep the pages that were emailed to me.  I convert it to PDF, then I can crop it using a free program like BRISS or PDF Scissors.  Next - and this is important - I need to run the document through an OCR scanner.  What OCR does is takes a photocopy or scan and automatically recognizes the text on the screen so you can actually copy that text and paste it somewhere else.  I have one built into my awesome, free PDF reader, and I know there is one built into Adobe Acrobat Pro as well.  If you are dealing with a non-English document, you need to set your OCR scanner to operate in the document's language.  Once I have done OCR to the document, I can use my PDF reader to easily highlight text on it, or even to copy words from that document and put them into other documents.  This is very important, especially if you have a non-English document you want to translate.  To do this, you can simply copy text from your book chapter and paste it into Google Translate.  Google Translate will give you a decent translation, though imperfect, but it is a great start.  I have also realized that Microsoft Word has a translation function in it which is quite nice; if you paste the text into Word (or if the foreign document is already in Word format) simply go to Review > Translate and take it from there.  If, when you paste the document into one of these programs, you find yourself with a lot of extra white spaces or line breaks, you can visit this site and get them removed with that free tool.Anyway, these shortcuts have and will continue to help me hone my research.  In my graduate work I have tried to go paperless in my work - not only because printing is expensive, but also because I then have the document on my computer, with my notes on it, for future reference.  Being able to scan in book chapters is another step in that direction.  Also, as I deal with more and more foreign language documents, having a way to translate them faster is becoming necessary.  Please let me know if you have questions about any of this.