Save the Trees!
Mar. 27th, 2007 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bjarvisDuring my three year stint as secretary of the DC Lambda Squares, I received a large quantity of paper. Specifically, these were financial statements, cancelled checks, membership forms, meeting minutes, etc., from about 1985 to the present. While some of the more current items went to my successor, I had more storage space so I kept the bulk of the oldest archives.
I have access to a delightful photocopier which is capable of scanning pages from the sheet feeder and e-mailing me the resulting PDF file. This morning, when every other task I attempted was blocked, I pulled out the first few files and began scanning the archives.
The process was both harder and simpler than I was expecting. I discovered the sheet feeder had issues with more than about 35 sheets at a time. I learned the copier itself also had a limit of 10 MB per PDF file, although it would only tell you this several minutes after maxing out by printing an error page once the stack was scanned. I also occasionally found stapled documents which had to be separated manually, slowing the process a little. Still, if all went well, I could scan almost a page per second.
My hope is that the current board will agree that most of the paper may be shredded and recycled, and the digital archives will be passed to the new secretary. In an e-mail this afternoon, I proposed the board solicit a volunteer as a semi-official archivist. I'm not interested in the role myself, but it's useful to have a particular point-of-contact to whom official documentation may be passed for digitizing and/or storage once its currency has passed.
I've done a preliminary cut of the archives, selecting the files which would be most easily scanned. Things like old cancelled checks would be much more labour-intensive so they'll wait until the end, if indeed we scan them at all.
I have access to a delightful photocopier which is capable of scanning pages from the sheet feeder and e-mailing me the resulting PDF file. This morning, when every other task I attempted was blocked, I pulled out the first few files and began scanning the archives.
The process was both harder and simpler than I was expecting. I discovered the sheet feeder had issues with more than about 35 sheets at a time. I learned the copier itself also had a limit of 10 MB per PDF file, although it would only tell you this several minutes after maxing out by printing an error page once the stack was scanned. I also occasionally found stapled documents which had to be separated manually, slowing the process a little. Still, if all went well, I could scan almost a page per second.
My hope is that the current board will agree that most of the paper may be shredded and recycled, and the digital archives will be passed to the new secretary. In an e-mail this afternoon, I proposed the board solicit a volunteer as a semi-official archivist. I'm not interested in the role myself, but it's useful to have a particular point-of-contact to whom official documentation may be passed for digitizing and/or storage once its currency has passed.
I've done a preliminary cut of the archives, selecting the files which would be most easily scanned. Things like old cancelled checks would be much more labour-intensive so they'll wait until the end, if indeed we scan them at all.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-28 01:57 am (UTC)Life is good without paperwork.
just wait...
Date: 2007-03-28 02:55 am (UTC)Re: just wait...
Date: 2007-03-28 03:15 am (UTC)The snag with scanning the docs in any project is always the same: will the target format & media be usable in a few years' time? I'm reasonably confident PDF files will have a longer self-life than most other formats but I'm a little unsure about CD-ROM or DVDs, and USB flash memory hasn't been around long enough at current densities to know if they'll still be mechanically viable after sitting idle a few years.
those storage devices...
Date: 2007-03-29 09:54 am (UTC)Re: those storage devices...
Date: 2007-03-29 06:47 pm (UTC)Easy: hard copies. Paper has been around for centuries, and if stored properly, will last for centuries more. Completely invulnerable to power outages. And the media will NOT go out of fashion / become technologically unreadable in the future. The codex (book) was invented 1500+ years ago, and it's both forward and backward compatible.
the only real disadvantages are a) volume b) quick searchability. But they ARE foolproof against computer crashes.
Luddite? moi?