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Communications Data Storage

Preserving Old Research Notes and Documents? 101

Posted by Cliff from the reclaiming-space-from-unnecessary-paper dept.
twistedcubic asks: "I have several thousand 8.5 x 11 inch dead tree pages of notes and research that takes up too much storage space. I would like to have all these notes scanned into PDF files (for example) so I can recycle the pages and reclaim storage space. Does anyone know of a store that provides this service, or an inexpensive machine that will do the job in a reasonable amount of time?"
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Preserving Old Research Notes and Documents? More

Preserving Old Research Notes and Documents?

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  • In a few months time... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 10, 2005 @11:15PM (#13529472)
    In a few months time... coming as a duplicated story post...

    "I have several thousand PDF files taking up too much disk storage space. I would like to have all these files printed on to 8.5 x 11 inch dead tree pages of notes so I can delete the files, empty the recycle bin and reclaim storage space. Does anyone know of a store that provides this service, or an inexpensive machine that will do the job in a reasonable amount of time?"

    For future reference, I suggest a printer.

    --BladeMelbourne

  • Easy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ptaff ( 165113 ) on Saturday September 10, 2005 @11:17PM (#13529479) Homepage
    10-year old nephew and a scanner.
    • Or you can outsource to somewhere the cost of living is extremely cheap, like Cambodia. It's a labour intensive job. I use admin staff when I want this stuff done, but it's not my money I'm paying them with...

      • Re:Easy (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I live in Cambodia...it costs about $4.50 to get a quite thick book photocopied and bound.

        I'd imagine it'd cost a similar amount to get them to do the scanning, maybe a discount for bulk (maybe not, because scanning is more labour intensive than photocopying)...you'd probably have to teach them to make PDFs though...not hard.

        If you provided a computer/scanner, it'd probably be cheaper too...then you could just pay somebody $100/month to scan books all day (you could probably pay less...but $100 isn't much i

  • Lots of Work (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Zecritic ( 858738 )
    Even if you could scan all of them, are you going to just leave named

    untitled, untitled-1, untitled-2... untitled-3000

    or are you going to rename all of them and organize them in some way? You probably won't find a solution that won't take a lot of time and work.
    • Absolutely true, and honestly, "several thousand" pages does not take up that much room. Keep them until you don't need them, than recycle them. Just let it go, it's probably not that important.
      • Actually, they take up a two 6 foot book cases, and I no longer have room for them, nor do I want to spend money on physical storage.
        • Um, that's quite a bit more than "several thousand" pages. My 6' cases hold at least 10,000 pages per shelf and have 5 shelves. You could have more than 100,000 pages! You'd better check the duty cycle on whatever hardware you use.
        • You don't want to spend money on physical storage, yet you're asking about a service that will do the job of scanning for you? Here's a hint: for the cost of hiring someone to do this job for you, you can rent a small room at a self-store place for 15-20 years.
          • Will the self storage locker be heated/insulated? Lots of heat/cold and humidity can be severly damaging to paper. While unheated lockers are somewhat cheap, heated ones cost a little more. The digital archive will be easier to copy if needed, anyway.
          • The documents I have are actually useful, in that it would be a hindrance to have to drive to a storage space to refer to them. Money is not a problem.
    • You can always place them in named directories - just by using the thumbnail images you can sort the files out without having to rename them all.And you can always organise these into categories (with Unix at least) using symbolic links.

      The advantages of transferring all of these pages onto disk storage, is that you can store around 1000 pages onto a single CD-ROM, 4000 pages on a DVD, and 60K pages or more on a USB drive, and be able to take them with you wherever you go, without having to lug around a bo
    • I did something similar with old family slides, about 50yrs worth. But my "several thousand" was only about 2200 and I could scan three at a time with the $35 scanner I found on ebay. The originals are still in excellent condition, this was done for easy of distribution, no need to be sending 5 boxes of slides and an old projector around the country, would be bad if any of it was lost or damaged. It's a lot easier to write copies to DVsD and mail them for about $2.50 each. Sounds like you need cheap labor,
    • I've done something like this in the past. Here's an approach you could use:

      1. Look at how you've organized your paper documents. If they're in boxes, or file cabinet drawers, they must be named or coded, right? And within a coded box or drawer, you must have folders that are themselves named or coded (or notebooks?).

      2. Name your top-level directories after your boxes or file cabinet drawers (or whole file cabinets if we're talking about a LOT of papers). Then, move down through the hierarchy to more specif
  • Filing cabinet.
  • Okay, I don't know of a 'mass scanner' sort of device where you can dump a bunch of paper into it and it'll automatically handle it. But I can tell you that my aunt has a scanner that had a feeder that would accomodate one sheet at a time. She had it set up so she'd just feed the paper through, push a button, and it'd scan it for her and save it somewhere.

    Unfortunately, I'm having a terrible time remembering the brand of it. I also don't know if they're even made these days. It's not a great solution to

  • searchable db? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bluntzilla ( 898192 )
    i would try and convert the pages to some sort of text format to allow searching...

  • Buy a scanner with an ADF (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zhiwenchong ( 155773 ) on Saturday September 10, 2005 @11:41PM (#13529570)
    ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) scanners are fairly pricey (good ones are in the US$400 - US$1000 range, but you can get a cheapie Brother MFC-3240C All-In-One (C$140) that has a 20-page document feeder and then get a slave (e.g. some grad student) to feed in your pages for you.

    My Brother MFC-2340C scanner comes with the PaperPort application, which generates PDFs and supports double-sided scanning even though the scanner doesn't support it. (You just flip over the whole stack once you've scanned one side, and start scanning the other side. Paperport knows how to automatically reconcile the pages.)

    If you have Acrobat Professional, you can do a Paper Capture(TM) which is basically doing an OCR on the PDF and then storing the recognized words as "keywords" so that the PDF is searchable via Spotlight or other indexing mechanisms.

    A document scanner is indeed a very useful piece of equipment -- I use it to scan notes and scrap paper containing rough ideas, often with lots of mathematics. Sometimes writing stuff on paper is just easier than typing in LaTeX...

    The eminent computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra also liked to write stuff using pen and paper. His digitized works, called EWDs (after his initials, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra) are available here:
    http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ [utexas.edu]

    • Re:Buy a scanner with an ADF (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      That would be the best method, but I would seriously question the wisdom of PDF files. Although they represent documents fairly well, the format is too proprietary and too variable to be safe. You want the baseline documents to be in a format you can read at ANY time in the future, not just three weeks down the road.

      With the merge of Adobe and Macromedia, the constant toying with DRM schemes, the allowing of unsafe code in current Adobe formats, etc, make format choice as vital as scanner choice.

      A good exam

      • Re:Buy a scanner with an ADF (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:58AM (#13530030) Homepage Journal
        That would be the best method, but I would seriously question the wisdom of PDF files. Although they represent documents fairly well, the format is too proprietary and too variable to be safe. You want the baseline documents to be in a format you can read at ANY time in the future, not just three weeks down the road.
        I'm not a big fan of PDF, at least as it's commonly used. (It's essential for prepress applications, but it's most commonly used for online document sharing, an application for which it sucks.) So I hate to disagree with a fellow PDF-hater. But your arguments against using it are nonsense.

        Technically, yes, PDF is a proprietary format. a well-documented [amazon.com], widely licensed format. Really, it's just Postscript with a few organizational elements. Both Postscript and PDF have many third-part implementations, including one that's available under the GPL.

        With the merge of Adobe and Macromedia, the constant toying with DRM schemes, the allowing of unsafe code in current Adobe formats, etc, make format choice as vital as scanner choice.
        I don't see what the merger with Macromedia has to do with anything. DRM would be an issue if Adobe was the only source for PDF software -- but it's not.
        A good example of this was the use of Laserdisks for the 1980's survey of Britain to commemorate the Domesday Book. The Domesday Project is now unusable on anything but a very small number of machines, because they weren't adequately careful.
        Hindsight is all very well -- but what format would you have chosen? Floppy disks would have been too expensive, CDs didn't exist yet. If it had been up to me, I would have chosen 9-track mag tape -- and I would have been wrong [slashdot.org]. (I still have a 9-track tape containing a backup of my student files, and no way to read it!) In any case, that mistake had to do with a choice of hardware. It's a lot easier to recreate old software than old hardware.

        I'll skip past all your other hardware examples (papyrus???) and skip to...

        In other words, don't digitize (or file) for the sake of doing so....
        What, you think this is some kind of whim? If these documents are at all important, he has to bring them online. As long as they exist only in dead tree form, they are awkward to access, expensive to store, and run the risk of being lost in day-to-day use, to say nothing of the odd natural disaster.
        • I would have chosen 9-track mag tape -- and I would have been wrong. (I still have a 9-track tape containing a backup of my student files, and no way to read it!) In any case, that mistake had to do with a choice of hardware. It's a lot easier to recreate old software than old hardware.

          It's no problem to buy a "desktop" 9-track tape drive that understands EBCDIC. I'm sure you could then write a program to convert the data to something modern.
          • Why do you assume my data is in EBCDIC? IBM did own 90% of the market in that era, but that still leaves a lot of ASCII-based machines from that era, especially on university campuses, lab people preferred to have their on minis (usually a PDP) rather than share a mainframe, and no serious CS program relied on IBM systems.

            Buying a desktop 9-track would cost me something like $300 -- more than I care to spend to read one tape with data of purely nostalgic value. If I ever care enough, I'll send the tape to

      • I would seriously question the wisdom of PDF files. Although they represent documents fairly well, the format is too proprietary

        Yes, PDF is controlled by Adobe. No, most wouldn't consider it proprietary. It is completely documented & has implementations for both authoring tools and viewers not written by Adobe. It is considered by most to be an open format.

        and too variable to be safe.

        Each version has had incremental changes. Readers which support version 1.5 of the PDF spec are backwards-compatible

      • Re:Buy a scanner with an ADF (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sribe ( 304414 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:39AM (#13531754)

        That would be the best method, but I would seriously question the wisdom of PDF files. Although they represent documents fairly well, the format is too proprietary and too variable to be safe. You want the baseline documents to be in a format you can read at ANY time in the future, not just three weeks down the road.

        Bull. PDF is completely open and is not going away. To get the specs you merely have to download them for free from Adobe's web site. There are multiple open-source implementations of PDF readers. Although Adobe is adding features all the time, the basic format that would be used for storing scanned images has been stable and forward-compatible for years and years. There are multiple court systems which have designated PDF as the format for filing, storing, and archiving court records. There is work on an official national standard for long-term archiving of records in PDF format. (PDF-A, specifies things like: the PDF must embed the fonts used, and so on, to ensure that it will be portable across OS's and decades.)

        ...the constant toying with DRM schemes...

        A flaming example of a red herring. Your scanner software is not going to create a PDF with any DRM unless you tell it to. And some future version of your PDF reader is not going to suddenly refuse to read non-DRM'd files.

        The "silver" alumin(i)um CDs are much less durable than the "gold" disks, but both will fail in the space of decades even if kept well.

        Most "gold" CDs are merely "silver" CDs with a gold-colored label on the top. It's not even clear that the gold vs aluminum reflective layer is a real issue. But the dye type does matter, hugely.

        • The "silver" alumin(i)um CDs are much less durable than the "gold" disks, but both will fail in the space of decades even if kept well.

          I've given up on trying to find a storage medium that will last "forever" I'm going with multiple copies on multiple newer mediums. I have a few docs that first lived on 5.25" floppies. I just copied them to the newer option when they became popular, 3.5" floppy then larger hdd then CD then DVD and flash mem card. Storage formats don't go obsolete that fast, the CD has been

    • If you have Acrobat Professional, you can do a Paper Capture(TM) which is basically doing an OCR on the PDF and then storing the recognized words as "keywords" so that the PDF is searchable via Spotlight or other indexing mechanisms.

      Maybe I'm mistaken, but doesn't Google index PDFs? If that's the case, you can just upload it to a website and wait for it to be crawled for later searching.

      That doesn't really help with the scanning problem though. Parent's solution of slave useage might be best.
      • Maybe I'm mistaken, but doesn't Google index PDFs? If that's the case, you can just upload it to a website and wait for it to be crawled for later searching.
        The OCR process still has to be performed. I seriously doubt Google's PDF indexer is actually OCRing the PDFs. The majority of the PDFs out there are generated from digital text - and as such have easily indexed content.

        Scanned documents would simply be images until OCR was applied (or manual transcribing).
    • The problems with flatbeds are that they are often slow & the ADF jams quite a bit. A nice scanner dedicated to documents is what you want.

      I am extremely happy with my Canon DR-2080C. [canon.com] Note: It is the only piece of hardware I've bought, knowing that it won't work with Linux. I ran windows SPECIFICALLY to use this document scanner. It looks like it has been discontinued & the DR-2050C [canon.com] is the model to get now. Looks like it does larger documents, which is nice. These do duplex scans in one pass, so yo
    • I also have a Brother MFC and it's the best investment we've made. Actually, Dell sells an MFC at a much cheaper price, but we had to give it up because the scanbed doesn't support legal size paper (but the ADF does). Dell's MFC also comes with PaperPort. You can probably purchase from Dell with some back to school bargains (check the discount deal sites like techbargains, xpbargains, fatwallet, etc.). Even the cheapest laser MFC is a network printer (although scanning requires USB connection)--which means

  • Legal Services Firm (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's tons of companies that specialize in electronic document scanning & OCR, usually for the legal industry. Probably cost .05 to .10 a page, but you might be able to cut a deal as an individual rather than a law firm.

    • Re:Legal Services Firm (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      While I'm all for bargaining... I'm pretty sure that it would work out the other way. The Law Firm will pay less due to their volume. Although they usually need it yesterday and may pay a premium for that service.

      His one bargaining point is that he likely can wait much longer for his papers to be scanned. So he could negotiate on having his papers on a very low priority queue.

  • OCR probably not the way to go (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Saturday September 10, 2005 @11:51PM (#13529609)
    OCR is no match for eyeballs. You'd spend so much time editing it for slight errors, it wouldn't be worth your time.

    Are the notes graphics-heavy (i.e., scientific/engineering)?

    If not, give it to a typing service. Once you show them how much "stuff" you have, I'm sure they'll give you a discount. They might even agree to use OpenOffice2 (because it handles huge documents well, the files are small, and it has an excellent PDF exporter).

    You'd still have to scan in the pictures/drawing/graphs, and place them appropriately, which will take time.

    Also, there are firms that specialize it digitizing paper documents (mostly forms and regularized documents for businesses). Depending on the amount of hand-writing & graphics, it might not be appropriate, though.

    All in all, no matter how you do it, the project will
    • take a long time
    • cost a lot of money
  • There are companies that will do this for you. For example, IMC in WV (http://www.imcwv.com/ [imcwv.com]). They can scan it all to PDF using the image as what you see in the PDF backed up with the OCR'd text. That way the document is somewhat searchable, but you always see the exact scan of the doc when you look at the PDF.
    • If you want to do it yourself and you're desperate for OCR, you can easily do this in the commercial version of Adobe Acrobat (I've used it on 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, but I haven't tried 7.0). One of the "Paper Capture" options is to place the OCR'd text right behind the image.

      In general, I scan at high resolution (600 dpi) black and white using an Epson Perfection 3170 scanner with ADF. I don't bother with the OCR. You can either scan straigth into Adobe Acrobat or into Adobe Photoshop if you need to touch up any o

  • The unorthodox method (Score:3, Funny)

    by UnapprovedThought ( 814205 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:00AM (#13529636) Journal
    1. Climb to the top of a tall building
    2. Find the side that is closest to the parking lot
    3. Shake all of the pages out
    4. Have an assistant below shoo away potential meddlers
    5. Pull out your 12Mpixel camera
    6. Take several pictures as the papers flip end-over-end
    7. ??? (do some really amazing 3-D stuff with GIMP)
    8. Convert pictures to PDF

  • imDex (Score:3, Informative)

    by cstew ( 96019 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:05AM (#13529662) Homepage
    Disclaimer: I used to work for this company as a coop student.

    I would contact PRG Schultz [prgx.com] as they have done this for large clients in the past. Hey have a program called imDex [imdexsolutions.com] which is pretty slick. Basically, it's a searchable, cross-indexable database, so you'll have OCR'd text, along with TIFF's or PDF's of the documents. If you would like more information, let me know.

  • What are you going to store them on? (Score:3, Informative)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:09AM (#13529679)
    The problem is then you have to come up with a safe long term way to store digital data.

    Clue:

    There isn't one.

    The best thing to do is NOT convert the paper to digitized format. Find some space instead, and store the paper. Your data will be much safer.

    • You can easily make backups of data on a computer. You could put multiple copies in many places, all around the country or even all around the world. But paper has this annoying habit of losing data easily when it is burned or made wet, and there goes your only copy. If the world trade centre were full of paper, the disaster would have had a much greater impact economically.

    • Re:What are you going to store them on? (Score:4, Informative)

      by aminorex ( 141494 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:00AM (#13529860) Homepage Journal
      Not unless the notebooks in question were made of acid-free archival paper. I've seen cheap paper falling apart in 5 years, irrecoverable in 10. Phase-change media, like CD-RW, will easily outlast my children.
      • Magnetic medias can be wiped by EMR so it is a no-go. The only remaining mainstream digital storage technology is optical (CD or DVDs), but even those are not reliable. Cheap DVDs (like princo) can be unreadable within 2 years, often before.

        Apart from stone engraving, paper is probably the most reliable long-term archive solution, as long as it is stored properly. Of course it is difficult to seach and index but this is a different issue.

      • Phase-change media, like CD-RW, will easily outlast my children.
        That is only true if you get a good brand (or good batch or whatever) of CDRW's. I've had brand new Memorex CDRW's that LOST all their data 1 week after having data burned on them, without ever leaving my cool desk and without ever being in direct sunlight.
    • The matter of the fact is, documents on papers are not nearly as available as electronic copies. Hell, you could let thousands of people read all those documents at once for just a tiny amount of money in bandwidth costs (unless you have a university host it for free, which I'm sure they will). For most of us, this accessability is easily worth keeping a backup of the data, even if it also requires us to store it on new mediums as time goes on (i.e. switch from floppies to cdrs to dvdrs to whatever every
    • How do you store paper in a long term way without copying it? Clue: there isn't one.

      You have to copy EVERYTHING to new media eventually. You need to have a plan, and you need to execute it. Simple as that. Paper will disintegrate, and yes, hardware will become obsolete. You just need to progress to the stone in the river before the current one is submerged.

      But which is easier/cheaper to propagate to new media and make backup copies? Digital data in open, documented, implement formats, or paper? Which is che

  • Go low tech? (Score:3, Informative)

    by andreMA ( 643885 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:10AM (#13529681)
    If you just want to have it to refer to very infrequently and (possibly) print a page, look into having it filmed as microfiche. Viewers are fairly cheap and in a pinch a strong lens (loupe, possibly) will do.

    Many libraries will have reader-printers that for a small fee (eg, $0.20/page?) you can print a copy.

    Most of the expense with fiche is the production of the silver halide original; diazo copies are relatively cheap. If it's really important to you, have a copy made and lock the original film in a safe deposit box (or at least offsite)

  • I've helped setup something like this. The best small scale solution would be to get a good flatbed scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF). You can get decent HP scanners for about $400-700.

    Once you have the scanner, you can setup a few scanning profiles that automatically set resolution, color depth, black&white threshold, etc. Then scan the notes into adobe as images. If you scan them in as monochrome images at 100-150dpi you can get fairly small files that are very readable on screen

  • Not sure anyone like Kinko's does this. If they do, the price for several thousand pages will almost certainly be greater than the cost of buying an auto-feed scanner.

    I assume if you've collected that much research, you work for a university or some sort of research institution. My undergrad college of 1,100 students had like three of these, including one that was part of some ginormous Xerox do-everything-and-then-collate-and-bind-it-(if-you 're-printing, -of-course) machine that was sitting out so that

  • ADF (Score:2)

    by sakusha ( 441986 )
    I'm doing the same thing, scanning piles of my old college papers using an automatic document feeder. I bought an HP 8250 because it does duplexing, so I can just tell it to scan both sides of the sheet. I have lots of mixed double-sided/single-sided documents (like notebooks), it's a lot easier to just scan everything doublesided and go through it in Acrobat and just delete the blank pages. Plus, with the duplexing feeder, I can cut the bindings off old books, drop the whole stack in the feeder, and scan t
  • The ideal solution would probably be an HP Digital Sender. It's about the size of a laser printer, except it's kind of a laser printer in reverse. You load a document into it, it scans the whole thing at 30-40 pages per minute, turns it into PDF, and then sends the PDF across ethernet via SMTP to wherever you want. Works with any OS, obviously. It's sold as an alternative to fax.

    The problem is that they're about $2500 each (MSRP $3200), because they're a niche item. Shame really, because if they'd dropped i

  • simple (Score:2, Funny)

    by urdine ( 775754 )
    Print them in a book and wait for Google Print to scan them all for you.
  • Easy: Release all your research papers under the GNU Free Documentation Licence and post them on Wikipedia. If they delete them as original research, post them to my wiki where we keep everything.
  • The ideal way to do this would be to find a digital copier with an automatic document feeder, like a Ricoh Aficio or a Canon ImageRunner, that you have access to. They generally have a function to scan instead of copy, and they scan at very high speeds (even duplex scanning!). The data is often retrievable over a simple LAN - I've even seen some that support TWAIN over LAN.

  • hylafax (Score:5, Interesting)

    by np_bernstein ( 453840 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @02:38AM (#13530130) Homepage
    go buy a modem, and grab an old fax machine, then fax the documents to yourself. You should be able to fax a decent number of pages at a time and can walk away and leave it running. these will be saved as multi-page tiffs which while not pdfs and searchable at least solve part of your problem.
    • I hope you're joking but I have a hard time believing that this is the best solution. I'm not sure why this was modded interesting instead of funny. Fax quality is generally low, and data transmission over a phone line will increase the time spent needlessly.

      It's really no improvement over the obvious: get a scanner with an autofeeder. However, I'm assuming that he's looking for something more industrial/quick, since that answer is so obvious. I'm guessing he must have already checked out Kinkos (which

  • Try a legal copyist.
  • If you want to guarantee that the work can be read in fifty years, get the pages converted to microfilm or microfiche. Then they can be read a century from now by anybody with a light source and a magnifer. Consult your local university library on how have this done. It's quite possible you'll end up scanning it all to TIFF files and sending a DVD to a service bureau, thereby giving yourself a digital copy as well.

    Unless you need the capability to grep the documents, there's little point in digitizing

  • It's possible... (Score:3)

    by NemoX ( 630771 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @02:31PM (#13532738)
    This is what we do at work. We spend about $5000 on the set up, but remember that this is an enterprise where we scan about 125,000 pages to .pdf a month. It is probably possible for about $500 or so, for what you are looking at (oh, and some programming)

    First, you'll need a low-volume scanner. (Check the duty cycle to make sure it can handle you bookshelf of papers.) Then, you'll need something to convert the images to pdf. If you have any programming experience, write a quick app that uses http://www.imagemagick.org/ [imagemagick.org] Image Magick to convert from tiff to pdf. Put each binding in its own folder, and pretend the "untitled1.pdf" says "page1.pdf" ;)

    If you want to get fancier have the front end app rename the untiled1.tiff to whatever you'd like. Also, you can embed extra information into the pdf by using metadata and Adobe XMP SDK (free download from Adobe). Make the meta data like:
    TITLE="My Book"
    AUTHOR="Bart Simpson"
    etc.
  • Are these notes preserved "just in case" they are needed?

    Do you actually REFER to the notes every now and then?

    Do you need text or just scanned-images?

    Do the advantages of having them outweigh the advantages of destruction? Remember, if you destroy it then it can't come back and haunt you in a lawsuit. But then again, it can't help you either. Caution - before you destroy anything make sure you have an official data-retention policy, and stick with that policy. Otherwise, destroying data CAN be seen as
  • What you are looking for is a Document Management System, such things have been around for microcomputers for at least a decade. They include a hi-performace scanner and quality OCR software tied to a text/image database. The database holds the scanned data in a serchable and usable form, and the originals are stored in a indexed image archive (to look at images or to verify accuracy). Once finalized the data is burned to CD to archive if needed.

    Legal businesses and accounting departments use this stuff

  • Those handwritten notebooks are legal documents proving you did that work when you dated it. That's why engineers keep notebooks. If they are digital, do they keep their status as legal documents? This is an important question to me, so I hope someone knows :D
    • They do in the airline maintenance field. Airlines are switching their mechanics from paper docs to computerized paperless systems. The FAA has approved these new digital documents as legal documents proving work has been done.
  • Ask the experts at the Einstein Papers Project [caltech.edu]. They have been doing this for quite some time.

  • DjVu, not PDF (Score:3, Informative)

    by TeXMaster ( 593524 ) on Monday September 12, 2005 @04:07AM (#13536039)
    There is a file format which is specifically created for this kind of stuff, and it's called DjVu [djvuzone.org]. There is a free (as in open source) reference library [djvuzone.org], and proprietary tools by LizardTech [lizardtech.com].

    (Of course, you will still need to spend lots of time scanning, naming and classifying those pages. The ADF and 10yo nephew suggested in another post might be useful for that.)

    DjVu offers very compact representation without the need to OCR the document (I've converted a 13 megs scanned PDF into a 600K DjVu which was much faster and easier to read), and optionally a "hidden text layer" if you want to OCR it to make it searchable.

  • Seriously. Throw them out. Especially if more than 5 years old. What are the chances that you are going to need to refer to them? Compare the time and effort to what you could be doing instead.

    If you really need to keep them, throw them in boxes and put them in document storage somewhere. Then, on the off chance you might need them for patent disputes, etc., you can hire someone for $8/hr to go thru them.

  • Does this really need to be done quickly? If not, you could do it yourself with just one to three pages a day, which should be very managable. This would save you the money of paying someone and it would give you the chance to quality check each page as you go.

    Unless you plan on using OCR, these documents could also be saved in tiff, png, or jpeg formats. Personally, I would consider a format that allows for the embedding of keywords into the file, so that searching will be easier later on.

    Good luck.
  • 1. Get a scanner with a document feeder.
    2. Get software to scan to PDF format.
    3. Get Google Desktop Search which will index the contents of PDF or get an Apple Mac with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Spotlight will index your PDF's. If you have a Mac, you may be able to scan to PDF without needing Adobe Acrobat.

    Don't know about scanner services, but check around and you might find someone who can scan the documents to PDF and give you a DVD-R or CD-R's with the files. Kinko's? Print Shop?

    We have highend Kodak
  • In the last two weeks, I have done broadly the same thing. I work at a hospital with a large canon photocopier (ir5020i). This has an auto-document feeder like any self-respecting copier would.

    It is also a network device to scan / print. I took in my computer (mac mini) plugged into the ethernet port and (adding 20-30 minutes of fiddling) was away.

    So.. make friends with your local big company (a hospital would be good - you can make a small donation).
    Bear in mind though that it took me pretty much a
  • I work at a place that does this kind of stuff. I can say though that storage space is cheaper than you would think and in even the medium term a better idea.

    If you really need to be able to access it though something like that should cost between 10 and 20 cents a page (in that quantity) depenind on the standards for the accuracy and the feedability. (if it is 100 page documents in 3 ring biders with no staples and clean edges and no post its expect it to cost a lot less than 2 page documents covered wit
  • I explored offering this service as part of my consulting practice a few years back. Turned out hardware and software weren't the limitations, even if I could use a simple ADF scanner with a reasonably- priced temp staff. The limitation was the time to organize it into usable categories and make it the file name match the type of content, etc. I'm intrigued by some of the new software such as PaperPort http://www.scansoft.com/paperport/standard/ [scansoft.com] that apparently makes the documents searchable, minimizing

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