[Novalug] Documents scanning service recommendations?

Bonnie Dalzell bdalzell@qis.net
Mon Mar 10 00:17:41 EDT 2014


On Sun, 9 Mar 2014, Kevin Cole wrote:

> I'm attempting to avoid a guest appearance on "Hoarders" and to that end am
> thinking about a more efficient way to handle ancient paper documents and
> not so ancient.
>
> Any recommendations / caveats on affordable commercial services? In an
> ideal world I would like the text to be text, though I'm guessing I may be
> better off with images, rather than letting auto-mistakers "fix" documents.
> I'm talking about 10-20 "Banker" boxes worth, with a rare appearance of
> 40-year-old likely faded text on yellowed paper document, though most are
> considerably more recent / readable.
>

If you have a scanner you can scan by yourself and save as images- takes 
time. Then name each scan in a way that makes it easy to know what is on 
it.

The thing is that to do OCR you need to scann at a higher resolution than 
you need to do for saving as an image.

In my experience older documents are much harder to feed through OCR than 
newer documents that are laser printed. Scanning numbers can result in 
more errors - and especially more important errors - than scanning 
straight text. Proof reading can sometimes take more time than just 
sitting down and typing the document into the computer for old books, 
for example.

Places such as Kinkos will do image scans for a relatively reasonable 
price and give you the results on a thumb drive.

Remember make your archival copies of the documents on DVD's. You can buy 
archival quality DVD's. If the stuff is really important do two copies 
and keep one in a safe deposit box at the bank. Also you can store a 
backup in a cloud facility.

Places like Iron Mountain specialize in secure.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                        Bonnie Dalzell, MA
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