Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [75]
If you have many years’ worth of paper accumulated in file drawers, cabinets, and boxes, consider sending it all out to a service for scanning. It will likely cost between four hundred and a thousand dollars for ten thousand pages. The price increases for mixed sizes and artifacts such as scrapbooks. If you have a lot, and you value your time, I’d call it money well spent.
Even if you use a scanning service now, you will still need a scanner for future incoming paper. Some organizations aren’t prepared to go paperless, so you will keep getting items to scan from them. Set up a dedicated scanning in-box, and don’t let it get more than an inch deep.
Today’s scanners and software do not automatically add tags or keywords to your documents, and are not likely to for quite a few years. Make sure that OCR is being performed on every scan. And follow my tips below for file naming and tagging.
Occasionally, I find it handy to use my camera instead of a scanner. For instance, while I’m traveling, I might snap a quick picture of a receipt and tear it up rather than take it home to scan. I also hate keeping around the big cases holding my software CDs—but I can never peel off the label containing the product key without destroying it. My solution is to snap a picture of the label (the lighting only has to be good enough to let me read the product key). This way, I was able to recycle a bunch of cases and cut back to one compact little holder of CDs for all my software.
Books
For your books that are out of copyright, the chances get better every day that you will be able to download a copy from the Web for free. Project Gutenberg has more than twenty-five thousand free books available in their catalog and more than a hundred thousand available through their partners and affiliates. Google is scanning millions of titles; keep an eye on them to make more books available. Several formats may be available; pick either PDF or some other text-friendly format so you can search the entire book with your e-memory.
Online libraries are available for a fee. Questia, the largest online library as of 2008, has books, journals, magazines, and newspapers all available and searchable via keywords. They even provide a personal library shelf, where you can store books that you’ve viewed. The workspace allows you to create and manage projects, track your research by viewing highlighted passages, notes, and citations you’ve made, and even make instant bibliographies or source notes. LexisNexis is another online service that provides business, legal, and news services, all searchable easily though keywords. Whenever possible, save copies of what you read, or at least a note of what you read. For example, if you copy and paste a passage into OneNote, it will also save a link to the Web page.
Invest in Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s eBook, or another similar electronic reading device. That way, your new books can be born digital. You also will be able to mark passages and load them into your computer. Wizcon makes a pen scanner that permits you to make highlights in any of your reading materials and automatically transfer those highlights to your computer for future reference.
When you buy a new appliance, go online, download the electronic version of the manual, and throw the paper one away. You may end up having to scan a few manuals, but this happens less and less as every year goes by. Manufacturers, after all, are happy to have you download a file rather than phone them and take time from their staff.
For e-books, e-articles, and e-manuals, the issue is search-ability.