The stacks:
So I've kind of already done some weeding through my stacks of the last 10 years or so and, from what I can tell, this is pretty much what's left. It doesn't look like a lot, but I would estimate that it's probably a good 100 pounds of paper. At approximately 100 sheets per pound, according to Answerbag.Com and unusually complex mathmatical equations), so this means that I have probably around 10,000 sheets of paper! Let's hope I'm WAY off on my weight estimates, otherwise it could take me weeks to get through it all.
Now, on to my setup. I have my computer, of course, and I have a Visioneer 9450 USB scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). The Visioneer comes with software that makes it pretty easy to one-touch scan to PDF, which should make the process go pretty quickly. I also have the option of doing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scans, but I think I'll forgo that and just develop a consistent naming convention for my files. I've decided against doing any sort of "document management system", because A)The good ones typically cost a lot of money, and B) I think this can be done with just a scanner, PDF documents, a standard naming convention, and a well structured Windows file system.
So here's my initial plan for scanning.
1) - Start by sorting the papers into logical groups that match my folder structure in Windows.
2) Next, sort the papers themselves into some kind of order, most likely chronological, making things go much more smoothly when the actual scanning starts.
3) Scan the pages. (Note: Unfortunately, the 9450 is a simplex scanner, meaning it can only scan one side at a time, in order to scan two sided documents, I'd need a duplex scanner. Of course duplex scanners are considerable more expensive and, since this is really a "home" project, I think I can magage just running the scans through twice and then combine the documents in Adobe Acrobat. This adds a couple of extras steps, and they'll be out of order - 1,3,5,7,2,4,6,8 - but I think I can live with that.)
4) Create fire-starting and packaging material! Once the documents are scanned, I'll be cramming through a shredder (yet to purchase, by the way), producing a beautiful pile of little bits of paper that I'll never have to mess with again. :-D
