Life at the Home20

On Friday I explained that I have been planning to scan all my genealogical source material into the computer for quite some time. This would make locating and retrieving documents much easier.

A year and a half ago I purchased the scanner and software but was hesitant to begin the project for fear I had not chosen the proper means to complete it successfully.  I didn’t want to get well into a massive project only to find out it wouldn’t work the way I planned. After additional research I decided to proceed with the PaperPort 10 software produced by Scansoft.

Installation was easy.  I installed to the default C drive because I still have 137 GB of space left.  Now I don’t want to get too many documents on this drive so I need to monitor how fast the space is being eaten up by the files scanned in. I could have purchased a larger external drive but I didn’t want the extra expense if the software did not perform as I expected. I can add a drive later for more file storage. Moving documents already scanned in at a later time may be tricky. That’s also something to consider. The database being built by PaperPort may not handle a change in file path very well.  I also had no problems with the software detecting the scanner.

From this point on, be sure to have the scanner ON when you open PaperPort, otherwise the scanner will not be detected. Place the document on the scanner. The other reason I preferred to use PaperPort 10 is that I will be able to scan multipage documents into a single PDF file. If you are going to do multipage documents I highly recommend getting a scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder.  Make sure you uncheck the item “Create Single Page Items”.  To begin, select “Document”, then “Settings”.  This is where you will name the file (I’m using a sequential numbering system), select the file type, resolution, document size and mode (B&W or color). Click “OK”, then “Scan”.  You will be asked if there are more pages to be scanned for this document.

When the scan is complete, the image will appear in the space to the right.  As you keep scanning, all the documents will appear in order.  You can scroll down to view all files.  If you scanned a multipage document, there will be an image for each page but they will appear to be “stacked” and shown as a single file.

I then placed the scanned item in a page protector with a label showing the name given to the file as it was scanned.  Although we are trying to alleviate the need to constantly pull items from the filing cabinets to review, there may be a time when you need the original.  The items will then be placed in a binder in sequential order matching the file system created in the computer.  This makes finding the original effortless.

Next time we will discuss tagging and searching for scanned files.

ScanSoft PaperPort 11 is available at Amazon.com!

Tags: Computers & Genealogy //