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:What are you going to store them on?

[cfavader]

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).

hylafax

[np_bernstein]

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.