I recently cleaned out my office. I had reached the point I couldn't store any more paper. I had filled 3 five drawer filing cabinets with "interesting" stuff. And I couldn't bear to part with any of it. Sitting on top of those filing cabinets was a 200 gigabyte (GB) hard drive I got on sale for less than $100 after rebates. Why not convert all that paper into something easy to store?
My flat bed scanner wasn't up to the task. Feeding each page by hand would have taken weeks. A Canon MF5500 multifunction unit I use for a black and white printer and fax machine has an automatic document feeding scanner. With a 50 sheet capacity, and bundled PageManager software, I started scanning. At 300 dots per inch (dpi), color scanning, the MF5500 was doing a page every 30 to 45 seconds, saving the result as a 1 megabyte (MB) JPEG file. My hard drive would hold about 200,000 pages, many more times than I would need. I would set up 40 to 50 pages and work on other projects.
Two problems became apparent. First many of the interesting articles I had cut out had information on both sides of the pages. Scanning a stack of documents meant two passes and back to back pages would end up several files apart. After about a week, and one drawer of the filing cabinets, the slow scanning speed was becoming frustrating.
High performance scanners can cost $5,000 or more, and scan at 20 to 60 pages per minute. For a larger office environment, they can be cost effective. I needed something more affordable. An ad from TigerDirect.com for a Fujitsu SnapScan for $420 caught my eye. It is a duplex scanner (it scans both sides of a page at once) that can scan documents at 15 pages per minute. Even at the higher resolution color setting I wanted to use, it averaged about 10 pages per minute. The rest of my file drawers went electronic in a couple of weekends while watching TV (gotta love those Law and Order marathons).
Now when I get something interesting, I drop it in the scanner and its on my hard drive in a matter of a minute or two.
Related documents are scanned into folders on the hard drive. But finding a specific document among the 20,000 to 30,000 pages I've scanned so far was going to be a challenge since the file names are essentially the date and time when the document was scanned.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software takes images and converts it to text quickly and relatively easily. Most scanners come with bundled OCR. Abbyy Finereader 8.0 Corporate Edition can automatically OCR documents stored in a common folder.
OCR and a desktop search program (I've switched from Google's desktop search to Microsoft's, both are free downloads) would let me find documents quickly. I set Finereader to automatically convert all my files into straight text files with the same name. Even though the conversions weren't perfect (I noticed about a dozen OCR errors per page), the text is used for indexing so I didn't use any of the interactive error checking features-my goal was to get text the indexing program could use as quickly and easily as possible. When I need to find an article, I search by key words using the text file name to reference back to the actual scanned image. "Real" document management software, which can cost a lot of money, might save the step of using one filename to find another file, but this solution is cheap.
My collection of reference material could just as easily been product catalogs or customer records. The resulting files could be on your internal network, carried around on a small pocket drive or stored on a secure web site that you could reference from anywhere.
Keeping up with scanning all the paperwork that comes into your company should only take a few minutes. Playing catch up, like I did, takes a lot longer. Why not start going paperless this week?