This article is an extension of my last article, “Going Paperless.”
Almost 30 years ago my software company bought the assets of another software company. When the deal was done we flew to Southern California, went to a storage unit and packed up the “stuff” into a rental truck.
Part of the “stuff” was inventory we sold and paid off the cost of acquisition. Part was furniture we used within our growing company. The most valuable part was a filing cabinet that held the history of the other company. Going through that history, in the form of their files, was a great learning exercise for me. When we closed our software company, that history, as well as most of the history of our company, disappeared forever. It just wasn’t worth storing all those files.
Last summer my older brother passed away. Jim was an aspiring, yet unpublished writer. That was his goal and passion since high school. For the past 35 years, he lived in Bisbee, an Arizona mining town that found a new life as an art colony, much like Aspen or Santa Fe, writing.
When my sister and I went down in August to sort through his house, we quickly discovered that Jim never threw anything away. We made the decision to preserve his writings by scanning them. And there were a lot of them. We used both a Fujitsu S1500 I was evaluating and my S300, each connected to a laptop computer. Using a software program Rapid PDF Count I discovered we had 140,060 pages (since both scanners were operating in duplex auto blank page removal mode).
Late last year a good friend, and rep industry icon, Jack Berman passed away at the age of 95. His wife, Pearl, was kind enough to let us preserve Jack’s office (aka files) for the Manufacturers’ Representative Education and Research Foundation. Jack had written several books and hundreds of articles so I was confident there was a treasure trove of information. We’ve saved almost 40,000 pages of Jack’s work.
While the history of the software companies is lost forever, my bother Jim and Jack Berman’s literary estates can be preserved virtually forever. That is made possible by a combination of high-speed, low-cost scanners and virtually free hard disk storage.
Don’t let the hassle of storing paper records keep you from keeping valuable history.
Along the way, these two projects have taught me a lot about large scale scanning projects.
From a technical perspective, almost all scanners are pretty much equivalent. They get images of what you are scanning into your computer. I have to say that in that respect almost every one of the dozens and dozens of scanners I have used over the past 20 years functioned equivalently.
Of course one feature of the S1500 and S300 that make them truly useful for large scale scanning projects is they are duplex scanners, scanning both sides of a sheet of paper at the same time. Not only does that save time, it keeps the page order of a stack of pages as they are being scanned.
The really big differences in sheet-fed scanners is in paper handling. I discovered that 10 years ago helping with technology at a printing company that was next to our distribution center. In that industry the paper handling of a press or other device represented most of the cost and complexity.
I couldn’t have designed a better test of a scanners’ paper handling than Jim’s lifetime of papers. He had writings on what seemed like 12 lb tissue paper. He had writings on 100 lb card stock. He had notes on 3 x 5 index cards. He had notebook paper, Chief tablets, spiral notebooks, sketch pads with writings, even bound journals. We did have more misfeeds, but the S1500’s ultrasonic multi-feed detection sensor caught them and let us quickly recover what might have been lost pages.
Now to find Jim’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel…
