On Jun 19, 2009, at 1:06 PM, Constance Warner wrote:
It's like this: I was visiting the offices of a small nonprofit
dedicated to promoting civic activism and getting out the vote.
One of the staff members gestured towards a filing cabinet and some
banker boxes and said, "We'd like to get these [documents]
organized and have a way to get these out to our field organizers
when they want them and when we need to send them." They'd been
using fax, U.S. mail, and hand carrying the documents in the past.
Right now, most of the documents aren't even in electronic format.
They have basic computers, of course, but neither they nor their
field organizers can afford the latest electronic bells and
whistles (no iPhones, for example). A lot of small nonprofits are
like that.
This does not look to me like a job for a database.
Step 1 would be digitizing all the documents. A huge job. So step
zero is identifying a (hopefully small) subset that is most used.
These would be scanned to PDF and possibly OCRed by Acrobat for
searching. That's what summer interns are made for and this year
those are easy to get. So Acrobat would be the big expense. They need
to check with Stone Soup to see if they qualify for the non-profit
price.
The storage schema really depends of what their content looks like. A
series of hierarchical folders may suffice. Storage using a tagging
file system would probably be the best. There are $25 add-ons for OS
X that support this. MS cancelled that promise for Vista.
Also need to make sure that backups are up to snuff. I know of one
association that moved years of documents online and then lost all
their files.
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