I’ve decided that I want to go 100% paperless in my home office.

For the most part, everything I do is on the computer. I very rarely print out anything for myself, it’s usually for others. We have a large 4-drawer filing cabinet, and we can usually find what we need with out issue. However, with all of the technology already available to me, it makes sense to suck all of that data into the PC.

The plan
Purchase a scanner with a Duplexing Automatic Document Feeder. This will allow me to stack up to 50 20# pages into the scanner at once and have them scanned front to back. Setup an XP or Windows 2003 computer with mirrored data hard drives for redundancy. Make one or both of the hard drives external (for removal in an emergency). Scan all documents to PDF w/ OCR. Install Google Desktop Search and install the network plug-in so that I may access the Document catalog from other machines on my home network. A DVD-R drive will make multiple encrypted backups to be stored off-site.

When mail is received at the house, it will be immediately sorted as junk mail, or keep mail. Junk mail will be shredded and keep mail will be scanned. My intention is to keep any of the “important” keep mail for a month and shred the rest.

The only items that will not be shredded will be official / original government documents like birth certificates, auto titles, home / property deeds, passports, etc… These will remain in the safe, however digital copies will be made of them so that they are on hand.

Any looseleaf books I have, like repair manuals, will be scanned and the books will be thrown out. I will also consider breaking the binding down on certain books and scanning those as well.

The scanner
I’ve narrowed the scanner down to two choices:

HP ScanJet 5590 Flatbed Scanner

Fujitsu Fi-5110EOX2 Sheet Fed/Document Fed Scanner

The HP ScanJet 5590 Flatbed Scanner is nice because it has a flat-bed scanner in addition to a duplexing ADF tray. HP is a familiar brand and it has some decent reviews on various websites. The software package is a bit lacking, from what I can tell, and doesn’t automate much.

The Fujitsu Fi-5110EOX2 Sheet Fed/Document Fed Scanner’s biggest selling points to me are that it allows batched scanning (you can separate different documents with a special barcoded sheet), blank page detection, automatic skew adjustment, and color detect. I think this will add to the quality of the documents scanned and should also cut down on the user intervention.

Even though I’d really like to have the flatbed capabilities of the HP, I find the automation that comes with the Fujitsu hard to pass up, it even comes with a copy of Acrobat 7.0 standard (which is $300 alone). I do have another scanner (older Mustek) that I can pull out for the occasional odd size document.

The server
The wife’s old emachines PC. It’s an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 1GB of RAM and a DVD+/-RW. For storage space I have 2 spare 80GB drives that can act as the data drives. I also happen to have a removable hard drive rack for one of them.

What about casual reading
I don’t want to be stuck on the PC every time I need to read something. I also download a lot of e-Books in lieu of traditional books. One device I’ve thought long and hard about has been the Sony Librie. It’s not available in the US, so you have to purchase it from an importer. Japan Direct, Conics, and Dynamism currently carry an English variant. What’s so nice about this device is the resolution, it uses eInk. The resolution and clarity are very comparable to traditional printed materials, and battery power is only used when you change pages. Some truly fascinating stuff. The DRM functions make it painful to use it with anything else. The good news is that it runs Linux and this site is working on eliminating those obstacles.

For now, I’ll just use a laptop…

The execution
Placing the order for the Fujitsu soon, once that arrives I will begin the process. My intention is to empty out my 4 drawer filing cabinet of all old bank statements, financial records, invoices, bills, and other miscellaneous records.

Update
I decided to go for the Xerox Documate 510. I realized that I still needed a flatbed scanner, and since the documate has a good 50 sheet ADF along with a flatbed, it was the obvious choice. After a few months of using it, I’m happy with the decision. I’ve run about 4000 pages through it so far with only a few jams, and one of those jams was the result of me forgetting to remove a staple from some documents (whoops).

Acrobat Professional seems to do what I need nicely, it scans, OCRs and will deskew a document fairly quickly. So far I’ve digitized quite a bit of paper and I’ve been able to either shred throw away (or recycle for your tree huggers) the old papers, or store the more important ones.

I’ve even cut down some old books and manuals and scanned them away, so much easier to search a PDF than to try and locate something using a traditional book index.

I’ll post antother upate soon on using the Documate 510 in Linux when it finally becomes supported.