Scan School
Traditionally, my family would burn all our school papers at the end of the school year. I grew away from that around Middle School. But I never threw them away either.
I now have a filing cabinet full of school papers from Middle School to college. There’s about 2100 pages by my estimate in all of this--Going digital has saved so much paper. Only in the rare case that a professor wants a physical submission, or you want to do origami, did you need paper.
I’ve never done a scanning project before. My dad bought a scanner over a decade ago. He archives all the reflection prints and photo film that our family and relatives have made or kept for over 100 years. It’s a daunting task, and he loathes doing it, but knowing that these memories are backed up somewhere, and that we can even do that, is relieving.
My first step was accepting this was going to take some time, the second step was testing the scanner. It’s an EPSON Perfection V500 Photo scanner. I looked for quality, size, and efficiency. I estimated I had 2100 papers (4200 pages) in my cabinet alone, so I don’t want this to take any longer than a minute per scan, or 10mb per page. The two big factors were DPI (Dots Per Inch), and JPEG quality.
The criteria I was scrutinizing for was
Clarity of text
Texture of text
File size I could swallow
There was no wrong answer here. DPI had larger gains than JPEG quality, and JPEG quality between the same DPI wasn’t discernable. So, I went with 600DPI-Q16.
While I would love to scan all these images at 1200DPI, I’ll sacrifice being able to see the printing densities for 4x the file size. I think it’s crazy cool I have the power to do that, but for these documents it simply isn’t worth it. I would consider doing 1200DPI on photos and film, and maybe historically important documents too, but let’s be happy I’m at least doing this in JPEG and not TIFF.
I’m scanning these like I am archiving them, so I am doing 24-bit color scanning (8 bits per channel, RGB) as opposed to B&W document scanning. I like seeing the tiny stains, and the difference in white between pages. It’s how I saw the papers. There is a 48-bit color option (12 bits per channel) but again, I think if these were more important documents, I would.
It takes about 46.37 seconds per scan. Which means I can make an estimate for how long this is going to take but even I know I’ll have to double or triple it to consider how bored I’ll become.
~4200 pages * 60 seconds (rounding up for transferring pages and starting the scan) which is 4200 minutes, or 70 hours.
The best thing is to take it in strides, put on a show or podcast, and take some walks in between. Currently listening to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. See you on the other side.