Make Your Paper File Cabinets

Make your paper file cabinets
searchable
How to manage paper and electronic
documents effectively
Presented by Beaupix Studio

Fashion, commercial, advertising, headshot, and
wedding photography in Boston, Massachu-
setts.

Make your paper ﬁle cabinets searchable
How to manage paper and electronic documents effectively

Revision 1.1

Ryuji Suzuki

Need awesome headshots in Boston?

License

©2009 by Ryuji Suzuki. All rights reserved. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 3.0
Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San
Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This work was previously presented at a workshop hosted by the MIT Libraries.

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My Background
• Photographer −→Terabytes of images, boxes of negatives.

• A wide range of interests: information sponge, news junkie.

• Have used search technology since mid 1990s.

• Used to have many ﬁle cabinets.

• Still have 4 big book shelves.

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How do we store information?

• Loose paper documents in folders or binders

• Magazines, journals, newsletters

• Books

• Electronic ﬁles (PDF, HTML, RTF, DOC, etc.)

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Paper problems

• Bulky. Heavy. −→×mobility

• Not easily searchable −→×usability ×accessibility

• Can be sorted and indexed for search
−→ ×requires upfront investment

• Creates “digital divide” −→ Stay in the easy world

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Solution

1. Digitize paper documents

2. Make the documents searchable

3. Manage the digital version with database and local
search engine

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Before moving on. . .

• The idea of paperless ofﬁce failed in the past.

• Paper is not at fault; the way we use it is.

• What roles does “paper” have?
How do they compare to computer system?

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Input Storage Processing Output

keyboard hard drive computer
mouse USB drive CRT
tablet CD, DVD database LCD
stylus
network search speech
microphone storage engines synthesizer
camera

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Input Storage Output

Pen Paper

Human Brain
+
Physical movement
of paper
Processing

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Paper: strength

In small scale, paper is:

• Cheap

• Portable

• Human-friendly, human-readable, human-writable

−→ Paper is good as an i/o device in small scale.
Make paper ﬁle cabinets searchable All images worth price charged.

Paper: weakness

In large scale, paper is:

• Bulky (low information density)

• Not searchable (lacks computational power)

• Not easy to distribute or back up

−→ Paper is a poor storage device.
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Hybrid solution

• Keep paper as an input/output media

• Digitize paper-based documents

• Make documents searchable

• Stay in digital domain for storage and search


Input Storage Processing Output

keyboard hard drive computer
mouse USB drive CRT
tablet CD, DVD database LCD
stylus
network search speech
microphone storage engines synthesizer
camera
OCR
Scanner Printer Recycle

pen Paper


OCR: Optical Character Recognition
• Recognizes text in the scanned images and generate
searchable plain text.

• Accuracy is less than 100%.

• Insufﬁcient to use alone, but useful as an auxiliary
data for search engines to ﬁnd keyword match.

• Solution: keep the scanned image and overlay
transparent layer of OCR text.


Paper

Scanner
Human-readable
PDF image facsimile image

OCR engine

PDF image Facsimile image +
+ searchable text
text (transparent overlay)
Computer can perform in a single PDF file
keyword search on these!


OCR: Recommendation (1)
OCR process is computationally intensive; it takes a
long time to ﬁnish on a large number of documents.
Common strategies:

1. Run OCR in a batch when you leave ofﬁce.

2. Run OCR in background.

Option 1 is more primitive but easy to recover in case
of errors. Option 2 is more convenient when
processing a small amount of document at a time.

OCR: Recommendation (2)

Some OCR engines resample and reencode the image
data−→Quality loss. File size may increase if the
reencoder use a poor set of encoding parameters.
Short answer: The OCR engine in Adobe Acrobat is
pretty good. Use it without re-encoding.

Note: Acrobat lets you control major parameters.
Many other softwares decide them for you, poorly!


Advantages of the hybrid solution
• Search instantly: papers, invoices, client case ﬁles, etc.

• Unify management of paper and digital documents.

• Archived information gets used more.

• Freedom to collect more information.

• Gain mobility. Retrieve your ﬂoor and hallway space.

• Avoid frustration at jammed photocopiers.

• Lose fax machines. Submit p-set from your bedroom.


What you need
1. A document scanner ($300–500 for personal models,
$1500–3000 for networked “group” scanner)

2. Adobe Acrobat for OCR

3. A document search engine or database software
• Spotlight (Mac OS)
• DEVONthink (Mac Application)
• Windows options: google desktop, etc.


Document scanners
• Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (Mac), S510 (Windows)

• Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M (Mac), S300 (Windows)

• Canon imageFORMULA DR–2010C, DR–2050C

• Canon imageFORMULA ScanFront 220 (Network Scanner)

• HP Scanjet 7800, N6010, N7710

Key factors: OS, footprint, price, interface (USB, network, USB
memory), scan speed, feeder capacity, multi-feed detection,
bundled software.

Workﬂow
1. Roughly organize papers in categories by date,
volume, access frequency, value, and subject.

2. Scan each document, one folder per category.

3. At the end of the day, batch process the PDF ﬁles to
make them searchable (OCR on Acrobat).

4. Take the documents in to your favorite document
database/search engine.


Prioritize Work
• Stuff you don’t need at all−→Recycle.

• Stuff you keep but probably won’t use−→Don’t invest more
work than necessary.

• Stuff you need and probably will use−→Organize and scan
simultaneously.

• Stuff you use frequently−→Invest more work to organize.

• Handwritten stuff−→requires some manual sorting and
indexing.


Workload estimate

• Initial phase: digitize existing paper documents.
– One drawer of a ﬁle cabinet takes about 4–6 hours,
once you get used to the task.
– Important documents should be double checked
for page skipping, etc., before destroying the
original documents.

• Once ﬁle cabinets are removed, daily work and
maintenance are minimal.


Once you’ve gone digital (1)
This will change the way you work in your office.
You will be:

• scanning documents, not photocopying, for records.

• printing necessary pages or sections of a document,
not the whole document.

• finished work goes back into the computer, not a pile
on your desk or file cabinet; recycle paper often.


Once you’ve gone digital (2)
When you rearrange your ofﬁce, consider to get:

• a desktop document scanner

• a small document printer within your ofﬁce

• one, two or three 24" or 30" LCD screens

• an extra fast, network-connected document scanners (if users
grow)


Some numbers

• Each ﬁle cabinet drawer ≈ 3GB.

• A 32GB USB thumb drive ≈ 10+ drawers.

• A 500GB pocket hard drive ≈ 137+ drawers.

• An internal 1.5TB hard drive ≈ 465+ drawers.

−→ Digital management of paper documents scales
well for individual ofﬁces

Remember!

• Backup often.

• Beware of information security (secure your
computer, encrypt sensitive documents).

• Secure your ofﬁce (anyone can search and steal your
documents quickly).

• Consider having a backup document scanner of the
same model.

Extra Topics


Books

Commercial books in print:

• Buy in PDF form if available

• Cut the binding and scan through document scanner

Out-of-print books, valuable books:

• Use a book scanner (OpticBook series)


OpticBook 3600
• The only solution available for individual users.

• Scanning area comes very close to the edge.

• Functions are well designed.

• A bit too slow.

• Software runs only on Windows.

• Software is buggy.


Oversize pages

• Carrier sheets (ScanSnap models)

• Scan piecewise and stitch them (photomerge).

• Tabloid ﬂatbed scanners (expensive)

• Take photographs (tricky!)

• Reduction photocopy (wasteful)


Non-OCRable material

• Handwritten notes

• Texts of minor languages

• Photographs of non-textual items

What to do?

• Use stamps, stickers or notepads with pre-printed keywords

• Manually tag with keywords


Sync your computers

Digital environment allows you to have your home
directory synchronized among multiple computers:

• Home computer

• Lab/ofﬁce computer

• Laptop

−→ Synchronize ﬁles all directions (use Unison).

Questions?

Contact Ryuji Suzuki through the website.

This author is active in the ﬁeld of photography and imaging
technology consulting.

Footnote advertising in this presentation is for Beaupix Studio in
Boston, Massachusetts. Beaupix Studio serves the ﬁeld of fashion,
commercial, advertising, glamour, headshot, wedding
photography. Please visit http://beaupix.com.


Batch OCR with Acrobat
Create an OCR batch profile (do it once):

1. Advanced −→ Document Processing −→ Batch Processing
2. New Sequence: give your OCR profile a name
3. Add “Recognize Text Using OCR” from left panel.
4. Click on the “Edit” button, select “English (US)” and “Searchable Image (Exact)” from the pulldown menu.
This setting does not resample the original image.
5. Ok to save the profile setting. Set output options as desired.

Run OCR:

1. Advanced −→ Document Processing −→ Batch Processing
2. Select your OCR profile
3. Run it


Compress PDF file size with Acrobat
For b&w documents, a highly efficient data compression called JBIG2 is available in Acrobat. Select Advanced
−→ PDF Optimizer. Select “Images” in the left panel, and look at “Monochrome Images” section. Choose “Bicubic
Downsampling to” 150 to 400dpi (depending on desired image quality) and “JBIG2” and “Lossy.” This is the most
efficient data compression for binary b&w images from a scanner.

In contrast, color and grayscale images can only use JPEG compression, and it does not offer nearly as efficient
compression as JBIG2. Therefore, in the interest of disk space, choose b&w document mode whenever it is
sufficient, as scanned color and grayscale documents will take much larger disk space.

Another useful function is Document −→ Optimize Scanned PDF. This function used to work very well in Acrobat

7 Professional, but not in Acrobat 9 Pro, due to change in the implementation of the edge processing. If your

document contains very wide margin, this may still work well. If it does, you gain very compact PDF file size.


Make Your Paper File Cabinets

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