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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 have several thousand PDF files taking up too much disk storage space. I would like to have all these files printed on to 8.5 x 11 inch dead tree pages of notes so I can delete the files, empty the recycle bin 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?"
For future reference, I suggest a printer.
--BladeMelbourne
Are the notes graphics-heavy (i.e., scientific/engineering)?
If not, give it to a typing service. Once you show them how much "stuff" you have, I'm sure they'll give you a discount. They might even agree to use OpenOffice2 (because it handles huge documents well, the files are small, and it has an excellent PDF exporter).
You'd still have to scan in the pictures/drawing/graphs, and place them appropriately, which will take time.
Also, there are firms that specialize it digitizing paper documents (mostly forms and regularized documents for businesses). Depending on the amount of hand-writing & graphics, it might not be appropriate, though.
All in all, no matter how you do it, the project will
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
That would be the best method, but I would seriously question the wisdom of PDF files. Although they represent documents fairly well, the format is too proprietary and too variable to be safe. You want the baseline documents to be in a format you can read at ANY time in the future, not just three weeks down the road.
Bull. PDF is completely open and is not going away. To get the specs you merely have to download them for free from Adobe's web site. There are multiple open-source implementations of PDF readers. Although Adobe is adding features all the time, the basic format that would be used for storing scanned images has been stable and forward-compatible for years and years. There are multiple court systems which have designated PDF as the format for filing, storing, and archiving court records. There is work on an official national standard for long-term archiving of records in PDF format. (PDF-A, specifies things like: the PDF must embed the fonts used, and so on, to ensure that it will be portable across OS's and decades.)
A flaming example of a red herring. Your scanner software is not going to create a PDF with any DRM unless you tell it to. And some future version of your PDF reader is not going to suddenly refuse to read non-DRM'd files.
The "silver" alumin(i)um CDs are much less durable than the "gold" disks, but both will fail in the space of decades even if kept well.
Most "gold" CDs are merely "silver" CDs with a gold-colored label on the top. It's not even clear that the gold vs aluminum reflective layer is a real issue. But the dye type does matter, hugely.