Batch scanning legal documents?

[bcr]

Hi all,

I've been given loads of ring binders full of A4, tab divded documents. The documents are all different lengths. The tab ears contain the filename for each document.

We need to scan these in, and I'm wondering if anyone has any bright ideas on speeding this up?

First thoughts are:

1) Scan per binder with tabs in-line. Assign bookmarks to the tab sized sheets in Acrobat and label. Use Acrobat to split the big PDF into per-bookmark files.

2) Scan per document and name it at the copier.

3) Some other clever trickery to split up the documents - perhaps using some other form of divider sheet to make it easier?

I have two Ricoh C5310's available for this task.

Thoughts appreciated.

Update:

I'm struggling to get the tab sheets to scan as mixed sized originals.... When i scan the batch of documents with the tabs to the right hand side, the scanned document cuts off the tab ear.

I can get it to scan them by rotating the documents so that the tab ears are on the left hand side, but then the scanner thinks the entire document is tab sized, meaning i can't then automatically select the tab sized pages in Acrobat..

 

[chriscozi]

First thought - unless there are many hundreds of tabs - put a color sheet in place with a handwritten filename.
Should be fairly quick. Sometimes tech is NOT the answer.
Then scan all and divide/rename.

 

[bcr]

First thought - unless there are many hundreds of tabs - put a color sheet in place with a handwritten filename.
Should be fairly quick. Sometimes tech is NOT the answer.
Then scan all and divide/rename.

Thanks - in the end have resorted to putting a bright coloured sheet in between as divider and then using those as separators to bookmark the pdfs

Scanning the tabs has been very patchy - probably only 30% of the tab ears are scanning properly

 

[kslight]

I’d probably just typeset the tabs, too much work to try to get the scanned tabs to come out well / straight.

 

[YourCastle]

do you have to keep the originals as-is? If not, maybe guillotine cut the tabs off? Assuming the main body of the tabs says what the section is.

 

[bcr]

do you have to keep the originals as-is? If not, maybe guillotine cut the tabs off? Assuming the main body of the tabs says what the section is.

Yeah it's the original master copies.

Main body of tabs is blank. All done now.

It was going ok until we got to the folded documents!

If I was going to do it again I think I'd make a colored divider sheet for each tab with the tab text on it and place before each tab.

 

[michaelejahn]

Hi all,

I've been given loads of ring binders full of A4, tab divded documents. The documents are all different lengths. The tab ears contain the filename for each document.

We need to scan these in, and I'm wondering if anyone has any bright ideas on speeding this up?

First thoughts are:

1) Scan per binder with tabs in-line. Assign bookmarks to the tab sized sheets in Acrobat and label. Use Acrobat to split the big PDF into per-bookmark files.

2) Scan per document and name it at the copier.

3) Some other clever trickery to split up the documents - perhaps using some other form of divider sheet to make it easier?

I have two Ricoh C5310's available for this task.

Thoughts appreciated.

Update:

I'm struggling to get the tab sheets to scan as mixed sized originals.... When i scan the batch of documents with the tabs to the right hand side, the scanned document cuts off the tab ear.

I can get it to scan them by rotating the documents so that the tab ears are on the left hand side, but then the scanner thinks the entire document is tab sized, meaning i can't then automatically select the tab sized pages in Acrobat..

Hi BCR,

I worked for a company - years ago - that developed software for jobs like this - and - also offered doing this as a service.

https://www.elan-gmk.com/cloud/

I have seen folks ( that is, folks who do this all the time, where they understand the file prep ( removing staples, un-binding, etc. ) and adding slip sheets ( often with barcodes ) and scanning software that can perform OCR and indexing ( for faster searching ) and table of contents generation...

Some have used Omini page from Nuance, or ABBYS Fine reader - but nothing compared to ELAN GMKs desktop apps ( like TMC )

Good luck !

 

[bcr]

Hi BCR,

I worked for a company - years ago - that developed software for jobs like this - and - also offered doing this as a service.

https://www.elan-gmk.com/cloud/

I have seen folks ( that is, folks who do this all the time, where they understand the file prep ( removing staples, un-binding, etc. ) and adding slip sheets ( often with barcodes ) and scanning software that can perform OCR and indexing ( for faster searching ) and table of contents generation...

Some have used Omini page from Nuance, or ABBYS Fine reader - but nothing compared to ELAN GMKs desktop apps ( like TMC )

Good luck !

Fantastic post! Thank you!!!