Digital Archive

pjv

Can anyone suggest a free or open source application that manages scanning and organizing of documents into my PC to create a digital archive. The output file preferably will be in PDF format.

I have problems in keeping up with whole bunch of paper documents. I need a way where I can scan it and put it all into the computer where in I can search, view, share and neatly organize the files.

Thanks!

root

I suggest you create a wiki for all of your files, it meets all of your specifications (exporting to pdf, share, view, search, organize, etc..) That's probably the best thing you can do. When you scan you should try to scan as text rather than an image, that way you can actually search the document. If you scan as an image you wont necessarily be able to search the text within the document.

charredii

yes, i will be a total n00b when i say: where can you find wiki apps to download? will they have to run on a separate server or a web server??

root

For a list of almost every single wiki solution look at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ it's a great site that helps you choose a solution that is right for you. All Wiki's should run on any web server that meets the requirements of that particular wiki, and the web server can be local or the wiki can be hosted on a remote host, such as frihost =) Some wiki's don't even need a web server to run. Check out the site that I mentioned above and find out what's right for your particular needs.

pjv

Tnx root! i just visited the wikimatrix site, lots of wikis that can be used. i'll check one of them and see if it will solve my problem.

Smile

anurag_bhd

Here's my approach to solve these type of problems. To organize the pictures, use Picassa 2.0 from Google, for songs use a decent media center application from the many available online(some of them even organize the text documents and pdfs too). And if you do not like the extra load on your PC due to the software installations, then just install the Google Desktop Search which displays the search results for various file types like the pdf, doc, mp3, wav and many more in HTML format; and not to forget that the indexing used by GDS is excellent. You may also try the recently released Windows Destop Search by Microsoft. But I would certainly prefer GDS over WDS due to performanne reasons. Cool