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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?"
i would try and convert the pages to some sort of text format to allow searching...
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 5-10 years).
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.
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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.
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 in the scheme of things...so might as well make them happy)
Then you'd have to add the cost of shipping...the cost of bribing the customs officials to get your books from the port...It'd probably only be a couple of cubic metres...so you could get door to door freight.
But yeah...much cheaper than the US or anywhere developed, but still not that cheap.