[Sussex] John's Stupid question of the week!

[John D.]

On Sunday 12 Oct 2003 7:57 am, Tony wrote:
> John
>
> From my experience you have a couple of quite serious hills to climb with
> this; firstly you need to think about concepts.
>
> If you are going to scan all this stuff, this could be a fairly major
> exercise in itself - scanners are quite slow and if you want any sort of
> throughput you will need a document feeder.  One of my customers has a
> fairly handy gadget with a document feeder that scans straight to cd or
> hard disk; can't remember what it cost but it must have been at least
> £2,000.  Were you thinking of spending this sort of money?
>
> Your next consideration is how to index it all.  You could try OCRing it
> but my experience is that this will not work well enough to be useful.  An
> alternative would be a keyword system, where you have to invent the
> keywords yourself.  I would opt for the keywords, but this may not be such
> a minor task either as you will have to at least speed-read the documents
> to decide on keywords.
>
> Unless you plan to do this on an industrial scale, I would forget about
> scanning and use a filing cabinet and concentrate on devising a keyword
> index that helps you to find the paper documents.  Then you can keep your
> index on the computer and search for keywords with grep.

Thanks for the idea's Tony,

Yes I understand that one "it" is set up, the actual scanning will take 
considerable time, it doesn't matter so much, it's just a case of getting the 
paperwork onto some sort of storage media other than paper.

Stuff like ocr can be done prior to when Clare needs to actually use a 
particular document or image. Keeping all the stuff as paper is inconvenient 
because of the space it takes up, fading, discolouration and finding the 
particular "thing" that she needs to use.

I suppose it's just bringing up to date, the "pile of magazines" concept and 
being able to "put her finger on it". Most of the stuff isn't used from one 
month to the next, but when she needs "something" she often needs it 
"yesterday".

regards

John