Scanning Someones Life - Long Labor Of Love - Fitting for Labor Day ;-)

I spent an entire week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for six days with one bathroom break a day scanning my fathers life history. I spent a few months finding everything and organizing it into a functional and chronological bunch of boxes.

I thought I was ready to scan it all having organized it as well as I thought it could be. I learned a few lessons this week. I have scanned at this library before. I have scanned at many different Walmart stores, and tried many home scanners as well as other stores scanners. See if you can find a fast auto feed scanner that does both sides of the picture as it runs through the machine. I also like the flat bed scanners that can capture many pictures at the same time and you can edit each as you scan. That way you aren't saving double copies of every scan, even when it is bad and needs editing but many flat bed scanners don't capture more than one photo at a time. 

I would say I am probably more skilling in scanning than 99 % of the people in the U.S. but even with that, I wasn't ready and as organized as I should have been. 

Here is a list of items you should take when scanning histories, documents, newspaper articles, pictures, certificates and any other history: 

scissors
staple remover
stapler
small baggies for paper clips
clear non-shiny tape
small bag for trash
snacks
water bottle
chair cushion 
tissues
paper towels
extra file folders or plastic sheet covers
Kart / dolly to move boxes or totes of items to scan
BACK UP DRIVE with room for amount of scans you are doing 
another BACK UP drive as I did scans of slides which take a long time and those scanned while I used another back up drive to scan on a near by flatbed scanner. I also sometimes do two document scanners doing different files on both so have at least 2 large USB or back up drives is SUPER helpful if you are doing large amounts of scans. 
HELPING HANDS is always great, but I can't get my siblings to participate so my daughters have helped in the past. 

Make sure you take a chair pad. I forgot my purple pad, and many times, the chairs in this library are so horrible I can't sit for a few days after scanning for even a few hours, but they replaced them with really cushioned chairs so I took a blanket out of my car to sit on but never had pain like I did before. But, until you know, I suggest taking a pad if you are going to do marathon sessions. 

Take out all the staples ahead of time and replace with paper clips if needed. Taking time to pull out staples while scanning took lots of time and I missed some which ripped the documents. 

Pull the letters or certificates out of the envelopes and you can put the envelop behind the letter or before but be consistent so people can know which letter goes to which envelope as sometimes people didn't date their letters or certificates but if I scanned the envelope, I could tell exactly when the letter was date stamped or the event happened due to the stamp on the envelope. Know your scanner as the document scanner we used, the envelopes went in bottom first as this caused the least amount of issues with the scanner. 

Lay the letters out flat in order in a folder so you can insert them all into the scanner together as one document as when I titled them all, it took them out of the chronological order I had them in. So now, I have to go back to that first batch of scanning and rename them to get them back into order by date. 
If you do title them, put a number or date in front of the title so they stay in order. For example, best way I found to find items is by date. So, I put the full year first, then the day, month and year, then the title. 

So, I would put
2019 9-1-19 Scans for blog
2019 9-2-19 Scans for blog day 2 
etc. 

This makes it SO much easier to find what you need. I'll share more tomorrow. Have a Blessed Day!