Bulk Scanning

Dear Magnet Members,

Has anyone here worked on bulk scanning projects? Here is an idea
I'm hoping to get feedback/ideas on:

I work in an office where we regularly have documents in letter
format coming in to archive. Usually, we enter them into Filemaker
and file them into large file cabinets. Over the years, we have
accumulated over 30,000+ documents, with records for the past 5 years
in our database.

My goals with these documents is to set up a system whereby the
incoming paper is digitized into .pdf's with text behind them (I'm
not sure about the right way of saying this, but its where there is a
.pdf file with text contained in the file 'behind' the image so a
search engine can index the file). Secondly, I want to create a
master directory on our server to file the documents while putting a
reference in a container field in the database's record pointing to
the file's location.

Problems: What software should we buy? The recent version of
Omnipage Pro says it will create the .pdf and OCR the image
automatically...but how reliable is this software? Can it be relied
upon to do this job?

The second issue is what hardware we need. I was thinking an HP
Scanjet with an Automatic Document Feeder. Its crucial that both the
software and the scanner be as automated as possible to limit human
resource usage. Do you think this might work?

The final issue is we need to be able to search the directory of
files. In other words, I would like to have a google like search
engine to search the directory where we store our .pdfs. I have no
idea what software we need to use for this. I understand that the
next Mac operating system will have this capability...but in the
interim? Is there any software out there?

Thanks and sorry for the longish e-mail.

Ron Steckly

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Received on Fri Nov 5 08:35:50 2004