Document scanning for CD archival storage

[SnapperOne 0]

We've decided to scan and than store onto CD-Rs several thousand pages of business notes and Board of Director minutes using an HP Scanjet 4400C scanner and Plextor 12/10/32A CD-RW burner. Since we do not want the stored documents to be alterable once they are stored on CD, it is our thought to scan the documents as images, than store them onto the CDs via Microsoft Word as .jpg files. During tests we noticed that, while the originals scan almost instanly, the process of converting the images through MSWord as .jpg files is quite lengthy. Our questions are.........

 

For an average business letter, should the conversion time be long; and, is there a better way to achieve the results we're looking for?

[Davros 0]

Do you have access to Adobe at all? You could use a document feeder to scan pages unattended then use the batch automation to convert and save them to disk. You can do this with Photoshop or Adobe.

[Alien 1]

Don't you mean Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop?

 

As for documents, you could also scan them in with an OCR prog & save them as Word docs with a password set - that way if someone copies the file off of the CD they still won't be able to change it unless they know the password. Also Word format would be a lot better for reading documents than an image format like JPG.

[Davros 0]

Actually I meant Photoshop or Acrobat.

Consider PDF files too, and OCR as Alien mentioned.

If you really need to have images and not OCR, and you don't have anything but MS Office, you could still stick the jpg into the Word doc, and password that, although it will be kind of ugly imho.

[SnapperOne 0]

Davros & Alien...........

 

Thanks for the insight(s). You are correct, we do wish to store the documents in a format that will not allow the text to be altered at a later time.

 

With regard to your suggestions, we do not have Paint Shop, Adobe, or an automatic document feeder. I will check into Paint Shop and Adobe. Unfortunately, while the task of hand-feeding the documents sheet-by-sheet is tedious and time consuming, our equipment budget won't currently allow the purchase of an auto-feeder. Additonally, once this storage process is complete, we probably won't need an autofeeder again. Nonetheless, your "program" and password suggestions are appreciated.

 

With regard to my question about the conversion from a scanned document-image to .jpg, based upon an 8.5" X 11" sheet with an average amount of typing on it, should we expect the conversion process to be lengthy?

 

SnapperOne (aka Steven)

[SnapperOne 0]

Davros & Alien...........

 

Whoops, forgot to say that OCR doesn't work for our application, because it would require us to proof-read each scanned document for accuracy. Since we're scanning legal documents, 99% isn't accurate enough.

 

SnapperOne (aka Steven)

[Davros 0]

What version of Word are you using? I've got Office XP here, not sure if this works in earlier versions: You can click Insert, then Image, then from scanner, and it will stick your image right there on the page. Then you can continue to insert images into the same document, producing a document with an image on each page. Then you can password and save the document. This doesn't take very long for one page, but for thousands, I'd hate to have to do that!

You're employer sounds like one of my old ones, not considering time and labor costs vs equipment upgrades. It will probably cost more in labor to have you sit there changing pages for days than to buy a document feeder for $250.

 

And the conversion process should only take a couple of seconds on a relatively up to date computer. What software are you using for the conversion? You can get a free 30 day eval version of Paint Shop Pro btw.

[SnapperOne 0]

Davros........

 

We're using Win2KPro on a system running a PIII-667 with 256K of DDram. The software we're using is Word-97 (have found no compelling reasons to upgrade), HP Precisionscan Pro 3.1, HP PhotoSmart, and HPScan Utilities (this last item includes "HP Copy Utility and I.R.I.S. OCR).

 

Can't find <Insert><Image><from Scanner>, but did find <Insert><Object><Create New><Image Document><Select Source> (with one of the choices being the HP Scanner). We'll play around with it and see if it works.

 

And finally, is it you thought that there might be an AutoFeeder for our HP Scanjet 4400c?

 

Thanks again for your insight(s).

 

Steven

[Davros 0]

Cool, you got the Insert thing working it seems. It will work, but it will be tedious.

Check HP's website to see about a document feeder. But I don't know if they will work properly with just MS Word. I know they work great with Photoshop and the like; you start it going, and come back later to a crapload of images open in the program, then just do an Auto Batch run to format them (if you want) and save them.

 

Other alternative: Go to Kinkos.

[hardwarecrazy 0]

I have been archiving documents using Adobe Acrobat and I will never go back to anything else. No issues at all!