Digitize THIS
April 22, 2010 1:15 PM   Subscribe

A friend is looking for a company or service to scan in 20 boxes of random art, journals and material over the next year while she's in Korea. Where would you go?

My roommate has a garage full of journals, pictures, clippings, inspirations and other things from age 15 to now in boxes right now. Lots of them. Probably close to 20 banker boxes. She wants the content but would love to get rid of the physical stuff itself.

So I loaned her my scanner and she's been working on it.

Only she just got an offer to go overseas and teach English for a year and would love to take it. But now she has to deal with all this stuff going into storage again.

I said, there's a service you can send the boxes to who'll scan it in for you and send you back a disk or a drive (because we used one when I worked for Warner Brothers). I remember them not being too expensive really. Only I can't find what they were called (it was a long time back.)

So I need a service that will do this. Ideally one that I can send the boxes to all at once and they can send back one disk a month or so. (if not, it's fine, I can keep the boxes in the garage and send them one at a time)

Ideas? And how much should something like this cost?
posted by rileyray3000 to Technology (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Depends on how much trust you have, but I know a high-school senior who spent last summer doing this as a job (for a company) for $10 per hour, and my daughter was begging to find something just like it. So I am suggesting that you find a high school/college kid (craigslist; school counseling office) that you trust and figure out a rate. I don't know how many scans that would be per hour.
posted by CathyG at 2:19 PM on April 22, 2010


Professional document scanning services for irregular or bound documents are very expensive, around $1 a page or more depending how much glasswork has to be done. CathyG has a great idea.
posted by rabbitsnake at 3:43 PM on April 22, 2010


The photos could be handled by ScanCafe. For documents, etc. I would second the high school student with the right scanner investment. (e.g. document feeder)

Of course The above is mentioned without knowing what level of quality you want, and no mention of how to manage the volume of material once scanned. Perhaps something like Extensis would be inexpensive and worthwhile to manage all of this...
posted by fluffycreature at 4:18 PM on April 22, 2010


Post in Craigslist Computer Gigs, offer like 10c a page. 20,000 pages = $2,000? Maybe 5c.
posted by rhizome at 11:29 PM on April 22, 2010


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