Preserving Old Research Notes and Documents?

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?"

Comments

Re:Not the ideal solution, but a start..

[NanoGator]

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I felt bad about the unhelpfulness of my previous comment. I headed over to Visioneer's site (www.visioneer.com) and found a few scanners that handle like 25 pages at a time. The more you spend, the faster it scans. Sorry, I cannot personally recommend a scanner in particular. Never had one like this.

Good luck!

imDex

[cstew]

Disclaimer: I used to work for this company as a coop student.

I would contact PRG Schultz as they have done this for large clients in the past. Hey have a program called imDex 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.

Re:What are you going to store them on?

[aminorex]

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.