Archiving all those articles

[garrett....@googlemail.com]

Ok, so the girlfriend has finally had enough, the 6 foot high pile of
magazines I won't throw out has got to go. However, before they go to
the recycle dump, i want to scan all the articles that i might refer to
in the future.

Does anyone have an idea of what software will do this? Something that
will do the OCR and also let me do keyword searches?

Many thanks

Garrett

[graeme.lyall]

I would not consider scanning them. Even cutting out items of interest
would be bad enough, time consuming and of questionable value. I would
just throw them out.

[JC]

I tend to agree on tossing them, but you could also make an index of
the articles and their reference information, assuming you could access
them again at a library or some such.

[beelers]

Just close your eyes and do it. I went through a similar purge about
a year ago with oodles of magazines I had carried through several
moves and never looked at.

Don't fall victim to flipping through them nostalgically before
tossing them. Time consuming and a waste of time in the long run (and
that comes from my experience).

[arehrlich]

You might give docsvault a try @ www.docsvault.com. The free home
version works quite well. It saves to a pdf format and provides a nice
UI to search and retrieve.

Alan

[Josh]

If it is essential to reference those magazines again, you probably
have access to an internet database where you can find these articles
again if you need them.

[mikshir]

If you find that you must archive a great deal of that information you
can rip up the magazines into a stack of individual pages, purchase a
scanner with an auto-document feader, put it in and let it go. I also
use Paperport by Scansoft (now Nuance) http://www.nuance.com/paperport/
to manage the documents. They have an interesting interface to let you
graphically browse and order and rearrange scanned docs (far from
perfect but best around that I've seen) and now operates natively on
PDF files and has a built-in basic OCR (they have a separate advanced
OCR product) but I never use it.

I reduced a filecabinet of old statements and records to the size of a
CD-R using this method and gave my file cabinet away. I didn't spend a
lot of time sorting/organizing, just rested comfortable in the
knowledge that i had all that stuff somewhere and access it if I really
trully absolutely needed it. I'm a still-recovering packrat.

If the information in those mags is tech related, toss it because it
will be obsolete if it isn't already. If it's reference material, the
information is probably available on the net somewhere. If it's
sentimental, scan the covers and make a poster, but toss the mags.

[Ella E-L]

If you absolutely *must* scan a few articles (though I agree with other
posters that this should be kept to an absolute minimum) OmniPage is a
pretty solid piece of software that you would probably find useful
later as well. (disclaimer - I used to work for the company, albeit in
a completely different division)

Another possible option would be to look into options for donating your
magazines - either to some kind of charitable or educational
organisation, or to an individual through a service like freecycle.
This has the dual benefit of reducing your ecological footprint more
than just recycling would, and potentially allowing you to continue to
reference some of the magazines in the future (if you donate to say, a
library or something)

:e

[Ella E-L]

right, actually mikshir is correct, PaperPort is a better application
for this particular need. Basically the OCR at the core is about the
same though - not quite as accurate, but still very solid.

[instigase]

toss em.

seriously.

try this peace of mind exercise: go to the library, public and local
university and see if you can obtain one or two of the articles in your
magazines. i bet you'll find that the cost to retreive the article
would be a bargain compared to the expense of a good ocr program with
the added time to scan and proof the scan.

[Garrett Murphy]

Well, last night i set up DocsVault [Free :)]. So far i am just getting
it set up but i do like the way it scans into PDF. It would be handy to
be able to search the articles once they are scanned rather than just
their names and descriptions. Would a product like Omnipage be able to
index the text of a PDF? I even thought that google desksearch might be
able to do that....

Garrett

[jtarchi]

If you've got Office 2003 you can use the built in document imaging OCR
functionality. I've used it for a couple of dev projects at work and
if it weren't for the generally awful quality of faxes it would have
worked quite well. On clear type it works great.

That or, ya know, toss 'em.

[graeme.lyall]

It is true that Google desktop does search PDFs, and is fantastically
efficient.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Garrett Murphy" <garrett....@googlemail.com>
To: "43 Folders" <43Fo...@googlegroups.com>

[Ru Temple]

Check the websites of the magazines in question: most are building
online archives in the past few years, and have been going back in
time. We were happy to dump back issues of Sunset magazine, since they
are archinved online; and Bon Appetit, since they're up at
http://Epicurious.com.

Archival websites such as http://magportal.com and
http://findarticles.com contract with journals and magazines to make
information available digitally.
Libraries subscribe to more in-depth collections of magazine article
archives, check to see what they've got, and what else they're planning
to get with the next $10 or $20 someone pledges to their acquisitions
budget. If your local library doesn't have, say, that $100 DVD set of
the entire run of National Geographic, why not give them a copy, and go
use it there? Same with any online archive you want access to:
connecting to digital resources at the public library is the fastest
growing area of collection management.

Beyond that, I second the motion of just donating your magazoids to
some medical facility waiting room. Unless your stack of magazine
happens to include 20 year old copies of Highlights for Children with
all the puzzles done. They already have those, mostly.