And I know pretty well it’s something almost impossible to have; yet I’d like to have it because I’m succumbing in a ocean of paper right now. And paperwork as well.
While I have the Sony Reader to avoid having to deal with tons of dead tree books (although I do have quite a bit still, lots of which are still being consulted), I didn’t try before to clean up my archive of receipts, packaging slips, and stuff like that.
Time has come now since I have to keep some fuller, cleaner archive of invoices sent and received for my new activity as a self-employed “consultant”; I decided to scan and archive away (in a plastic box in my garage, that is) the whole of the job papers I had from before, as well as all my medical records, and the remaining parts of the archive. The idea was that by starting anew I could actually start keeping some time of accountability of what I receive, and spend, both for job and for pleasure. Together with the fact that is less stuff to bring around with me, this makes two things that would get me nearer toward actually moving out of home.
Sunday and Monday I spent about eight hours a day scanning and organising documents, trashing all the stuff I’m not interested in keeping an original of (that is stuff I’m glad I can archive, but that even if I lost is not that important), and putting away in the plastic box the important stuff (job and medical records, receipts for stuff that is already in warranty, etc.). I think I got through around 400 pages, on a flatbed scanner, without document feeder, assigning a name to each, and switching scans between 150 and 300 dpi, colour, grayscale and lineart scans.
I guess I’ll try to keep my archive more updated from now on by scanning everything as it arrives instead of waiting for it to pile up for twelve years (yes I got some receipts dating back to twelve years ago, like my first computer, a Pentium 133) and then trying to crunch it away in a few days. My wrist is aching like it never did before, for the sheer amount of sheets put on and removed from the scanner (I sincerely hope it’s not going to give up on me, it would be a bad thing).
Now I’m looking for a way to archive this stuff in a quick and searchable way, file-based structures don’t work that well, tagging the stuff would work better, but I have no idea what to use for that. If anybody has a free software based solution for archiving, that can be queried by the network too is a bonus, that it works on Mac OS X with Spotlight is a huge bonus, I’d be glad to hear it.
I’m also going to try out some software for accountability; I’ve heard good words of gnucash but never tried it before so I’m merging it right now; for now I don’t have enough invoices to send out that would give me reason to start writing my own software, but if there is something out there customisable enough I’d be glad to bite the bullet and get to use it. Spending my free time to work on software I need to work is not my ideal way to solve the problem.
Up to now I only worked very low profile, without having to invoice or keep records; luckily I have an accountant that can tell me what to do, but there are personal matters, including personal debts, credit cards and other expenses I finally want to take a good look at, so that I can extinguish them as soon as possible, and then start putting some away to pay for a car and a places to move to. Not easy to do I guess, but that’s what I hope to be able to do.
File based could work… perhaps with liberal use of symbolic links?It helps if the format used to store the images, supports arbitrary tagging in the file, that way if a file becomes displaced it can be moved back. You might be able to do something with EXIF (if you’re using JPEG). A quick search reveals there’s no standard method for embedding data in PNG format files.http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~gis…http://tech.kateva.org/2006…The latter suggests TIFF6 and DNG as being preferred for archival purposes.Once you have a method of storing the metadata in the file, all you then need is a means of extracting this, and generating directories and symbolic links to aid indexing.I use a similar scheme to this now for storing my music: in addition to the ‘title’, ‘artist’ and ‘album’ tags… which have their usual meanings; ‘albums’ lists additional albums which the song appears on (with track numbers), ‘album_artist’ indicates what artist is prodominantly featured on an album (usually same as artist, otherwise “Various”), ‘artists’ is a list of all artists who performed the track in the case of duets, etc. I then use a Perl script to place each song and symlink it to the indexes.