Women in Technology

Article:		What's on Jason's Hard Drive
Subject:		document scanner
Date:		2009-03-19 12:54:05
From:		Tom L
Just wondering if you have any more updated suggestions on ducment management and scanners. I am not a big spender on technology, and have a mixed record in picking solutions. My current budget is limited, but I would not be in this fix if I had been a better manager of my work and finances. The most recent example is my spending two days searching for some legal docuements, with only partial success. And literally getting sick in the process from dust etc. My problem is I never like to disgard anything. I have been a lawyer, an historian, a secretary with several organizations, And I have a concern for actually preserving past records. If I had just had a good secretary instead of a bad marriage ... well, lets not get into that. In an ideal world I would like to be able to scan just any paper I get. Obviously most paper is not worth keeping in the original form - the copy in digital form is just as good. If I had started with this 20 or thirty years ago, I might actually have had more of a life over those years. And I might actually fidn those papers I do nned in their original form like my mother's will ... luckily she is still healthy at 94

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• document scanner
  2009-03-19 18:03:44  jchunter [View]
  
  
  Yes, recently I picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap and it's terrific. I have the S510M model (the M stands for the Mac edition). It's super fast, has a small footprint, does duplex by having two sensors read both sides at the same time, includes good OCR software, and is as easy as pushing a button. It's gotten great reviews on Amazon and it deserves them.
  
  It writes PDF files instead of TIF files, which is a bit easier for non-techie people to read. If you run the OCR it embeds word bounding boxes in the PDF so you can search for words and even copy/paste highlight the words in the PDF even while the pages look like the scanned version. That's crazy cool.
  
  Only downside is there's no flatbed scanner so if you want to scan an open book, for example, you can't. You could xerox it at work and scan it at home though.