Bob, The Maine Junction Railroad has just approved a new paperwork reduction policy. All model railroad magazines (in our library and future acquisitions) will be converted to electronic format (for personal use only). We ran a pilot project in late 2005 and early 2006 on one periodical in which we converted 20 years of the publication (20-30 page monthly newsletters) into searchable PDF format.
I ran the pilot with a borrowed Canon high speed scanner (a grayscale scanner that was available prior to the current DR-3080CII color version), and a copy of Adobe Acrobat Exchange which we already owned. This worked very well and went very quickly -- we scanned several thousand pages and created the searchable PDFs over the course of several days (not full time) working a total of about 35-40 hours. The keys were the Canon scanner which was a duplex scanner (scans both sides of a page in a single pass), and Adobe Acrobat to create the searchable PDFs. I used a three year old laptop with the scanner on a USB port and Acrobat installed. I'm now starting the conversion of the rest. It will take a while but not forever. My preferred scanner is either the Canon DR-2580C (25 pages/50 images per minute) or DR-3080CII (up to 86 pages per minute) -- both color duplex scanners which scan each page (both sides) in one pass. I've not been willing to shell out the bucks for either of these yet and so am using the scanners on my Canon MP780 inkjet All-In-One and my Canon multifunction laser copier (MF6530). Both have Automatic document feeders, were reasonably priced on sale at Staples, and work reasonably well, but are much slower. The MP780 will scan one side and then prompt me to turn the document over and scan the other side. The MF6530 still only scans one side at the time, but it turns the paper over. I run either of these in the background, when I'm working in my home office doing other things. I can only recommend Canon scanners as they are the only ones that I have found that reliably handle the workload. I'll continue to use PDF as the format, created via Adobe Acrobat since it handles all the scanner interface (via the scanner driver), creates the PDF and handles the OCR work to make the PDF searchable. It's pretty much a Start, forget, and Save when it's done app for this purpose. And if you buy one of the high speed scanners (the DR models), Canon includes a copy of Acrobat Exchange Standard in the box in case you don't already have one (~$200 to buy this software app separately) I've set aside a 500GB disk for storage of the documents -- the newsletters ran 1-2MB each, while some Operations SIG newsletters (40 pages) I'm doing now are running 5-10MB each (more photos & drawings). Color mags will require more -- but I'm not sure how much -- even if it were 50MB per issue, I could still store 10,000 issues in this space. And I don't expect them to take that much. In additional I've added a paper cutter which can cut off the entire stapled edge of any of these magazines in a single stroke. I cut off about 1/16"-1/8" -- just enough to remove the staple. Now to be able to search -- that's easy -- there are three free search programs which can search all of these PDFs VERY FAST. They are X1 (x1.com), Yahoo Desktop search (based on X1), and Google Desktop search. You will need some additional disk space to store the indexes they create (automatically), but doing text searches is very fast. I use X1, and it will also let you see the document (from the PDF) for each of the search results. With any of these no manual indexing is required. Just start X1 (for example) and put in your search text, and within a few seconds you'll have all the results back ready to examine. Perhaps more than you want to know -- but it can be done... Since I know we're moving at some point -- I know that the equipment costs will be more than offset by the savings on the moving weight, and of course it's much much easier to find articles/info of interest. Michael At 5/8/2007 04:38 PM, Bob Werre wrote: >Bill & Bill, I too, have a few years of all kind of magazines that have >less and less value as the years past. I thought of the idea of using a >flatbed scanner to scan in the articles that were important to me and >giving the magazine away or recycling them. It is a great way to save >the articles on a CD or even DVD. The problem is it takes months of >free time to do that and then indexing the articles in some kind of >catalogue format requires another trick or two. Does anyone have a >better way? > >Bob Werre > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Greene Dunstable, MA, USA Member: NMRA(Life), NASG, Bristol S Gaugers, The 470 Railroad Club National Assoc. of S Gaugers http://www.nasg.org DCC Corner http://www.dccinfo.com Maine Railroads http://www.mainerailroads.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/join (Yahoo! 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