My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many pages of sheet music there are filling bins and flexing cheap shelving in my house.

What do I have and Where is it?

The biggest problem we face is knowing what we have and where it is. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of classical and jazz guitar sheet music, but if I need to find Villalobos’ Choros no. 1, where do I look?

Shortly after I bought my ScanSnap, I began scanning in all of my sheet music (I have left much of my wife’s collection untouched—I’m sure you’ll understand). In most cases, I simply hacked the spine off of the original book and fed the sheets through the scanner. Now, I have less paper in the house and my music is searchable.

In most cases I didn’t bother to run OCR on the documents since there is little in the way of printed words on most sheet music that is worth indexing. I did take care to name the files well.

If you ever hope to find your music on your computer, make sure you include at least the composer/artist and song title in the file name.

Is this really cutting down on paper?

Whenever I find what I’m looking for I might play it directly off of the computer screen, but it is more likely that I’ll print it out. Doesn’t this kind of negate the idea of removing paper from my home? Not really. Think about it—most sheet music is never played. We have books with hundreds of songs in them and we play only  a handful. That’s just the way it is.

The fact that I print out five or ten pages in a month does not negate the many hundreds of pages that were scanned and then recycled.

Great for Music Lessons

I started taking jazz lessons again a month or two back, and my teacher gave me some lead sheets, with all kinds of useful annotations on them. As soon as I was home, I scanned those babies in, so I would not risk losing the valuable information. I also went through all of my notes from prior lessons and scanned them in as well. These kinds of things are precisely the sorts of paper that tend to get lost in some mismash of unsorted music.

Now, I can type in “Four” in my favorite PDF library application and find the lead sheet for Miles Davis’ Four.

Maybe you don’t have that many notebooks full of music lesson notes, but when you have been trying (poorly) to learn for as many years as I have, those notebooks begin to proliferate. Just scan them all in, give them some good filenames, add some keywords to help, and you’re in business.

What about copyright?

It seems that the jury is still out on digitizing works you own. There’s one fellow who made a right awesome device for scanning in textbooks in minutes, by photographing the pages. That guy’s machine has spurred much debate about whether or not you have the right to digitize your own stuff.

On the one hand, you bought the book and paid for it, so it would seem that fair use covers this; on the other hand, publishers are eager to monetize digital media, reselling the same works to you if they can.

So, is Daniel Reetz’s butt-kickin’ book scanner legal?

That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.

Google was recently forced to pay $125 million to settle with angry book publishers and authors who claimed copyright infringement as a result of the search giant’s book-scanning project.

But not so individual users who already own the book, says Samuelson. If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is “fine, and fair use,” she says. “Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work,” says Samuelson.

(Source: wired.com)

Here’s another take on this:

Question

I bought a book for school, can I make a copy of the book for my own use to write on so I don’t write in the book and can get my money back when I return the book to the campus store.

Accepted Answer

You have the right to make a copy of the book you purchased as long as you are using the copy for your personal use. The copyright laws merely prevent you from making copies to sell or distribute.

(Source: justanswer.com)

Of course, if you go passing your PDF documents around to all of your friends, all bets are off.

Final thoughts
Music is a hobby that seems to accumulate great stacks of paper, but these music sheets are peculiar in that you only need one or two out of every hundred. Why not digitize the whole lot and keep those book shelves from sagging?

[UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.]

[UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is good!]

When Snow Leopard came out back in August, I ordered my copy the first week and was so excited that I installed it the day it arrived. My joy was short-lived, however: the most important software package I use did not work!

I depend greatly on the OCR capabilities of the ABBYY FineReader software that comes with the ScanSnap scanners, and this was one of the many pieces of software that did not smoothly transition to Snow Leopard. I could scan documents, with limited functionality, but the OCR feature did not work.

Now that Fujitsu has released their official update, I will probably be installing Snow Leopard tomorrow evening. Now, do I do an upgrade or a full install? Hmmmm…

UPDATE

Well, they only delivered half of the goods.

I was reading through the seven-step process for updating the ScanSnap drivers and I arrived at step seven:

Step 7: The download for FineReader for ScanSnap update to Snow Leopard will be hosted by ABBYY but is not yet available. If you have already subscribed to be notified by Fujitsu regarding the Snow Leopard updates, an email will be sent to you when it is posted.

How displeasing. The only thing I really cared about was getting the OCR to work, and apparently Abbyy has not yet delivered their part (How hard can it be to update the part in your code that says “If the PDF metadata doesn’t match X then the document isn’t a ScanSnap doc” ?).

UPDATE 2

Instead of making us wait another month or two, ABBYY has delivered their patch in record time . I quickly installed the update and tested my ScanSnap script…

There are a few kinks to work out, but it is pretty clear that I will have my same old workflow AppleScript folder action up and running in short order. I will post the newer script as soon as I have it running properly.

And, as a side note, I had already purchased PDFpen from SmileOnMyMac as a backup plan. Their tool incorporates the OmniPage OCR engine, an engine that rivals that of ABBYY. My script was already running with PDFpen, but there were some issues with tables in documents that I forwarded on to SmileOnMyMac. One of these days I’ll post my scripts for PDFpen.

I trust my digital life to PDF. Almost everything I scan and most documents I write eventually end up squirreled away somewhere as PDF documents.

Have you ever considered just how portable those documents really are?

What’s wrong with PDF?

It seems strange to question the portability of these files, doesn’t it?

For the past ten or fifteen years Adobe has been providing Acrobat Reader and singing the wonders of their new universal document format. And it seemed to be all that, too—regardless of the audible groan we give when Acrobat launches after we click a link, isn’t it amazing that we can download press-ready copies of our income tax forms, that are guaranteed to look exactly the same when you print them as when I print them? Read on to see what dangers lurk within.

What’s the Problem?

In order to understand the nature of the PDF portability issues, one need only look as far as the web browser for an analogy. Consider how the web browser went from a barebones tool that could display a simple language, HTML, in a neutral way, fitting the web content onto each user’s screen, to a memory hogging behemoth that is an integral part of your operating system. It didn’t happen all at one; it has been death by a thousand cuts.

Mirroring the evolution of web browsers, the PDF document standard has adapted over the years to include many bells and whistles such as embedded audio, video, and JavaScript. It is these features that chip away at the core purpose and raison d’être of the PDF standard.

An example: Font Issues

A simple example of the weakness of these extended PDF features is the humble text font. When your application generates a PDF document, there is the option of using 14 standard PDF fonts, local machine fonts, or embedded TTF or Postscript fonts.

There are 14 standard fonts that should be available by default in each PDF reader. These fonts are Courier, Courier Bold, Courier Italic (Oblique), Courier Bold and Italic, Helvetica, Helvetica Bold, Helvetica Italic (Oblique), Helvetica Bold and Italic, Times Roman, Times Roman Bold, Times Roman Italic, Times Roman Bold and Italic, Symbol and ZapfDingBats® (source)

Guess what happens when you set your document in Mona Lisa Solid ITC and then print to PDF and send to all of your colleagues? Does your friend’s machine have a copy of this font? Maybe, and maybe not.

As I was writing this, I planned on putting together a cute demo by saving a document set in Mona Lisa Solid ITC in PDF from my Mac and then opening it on a PC. Much to my surprise (and delight), I found that the default “Print to PDF” functionality on my Mac does, in fact, embed the font within the document.

Regardless, if you have always just trusted that the fonts would be identical across platforms, you could get quite a surprise when your friend tries to print your beautiful document.

PDF/A Standard

Some time back, Adobe recognized the need for a more tightly controlled standard, for creating really portable documents, instead of mere portable documents. This standard, dating from 2005, is referred to as PDF/A, where the A stands for Archive.

A key element to … reproducibility is the requirement for PDF/A documents to be 100 % self-contained. All of the information necessary for displaying the document in the same manner every time is embedded in the file. This includes, but is not limited to, all content (text, raster images and vector graphics), fonts, and color information. A PDF/A document is not permitted to be reliant on information from external sources (e.g. font programs and hyperlinks). (Wikipedia)

Basically PDF/A forbids all of the flashy stuff and sticks to the basics: good solid document rendering.

Banned features include:

• Audio and Video
• JavaScript
• Encryption
• Nonstandard metadata
• Transparent images

In addition to the loss of several features, PDF/A documents can be somewhat larger, due to the embedded fonts, and they might have rendering issues with images that depend on transparency.

With all that, it still sounds like an enticing concept. Many PDF tools speak fluent PDF/A. Check out your own toolkit and see if you can future-proof your documents a little more

Here’s more on PDF/A documents

Long-term digital archiving with PDF/A (The PDF Blog)
PDF/A (Wikipedia)
PDF/A – A new Standard for Long-Term Archiving (PDF/A Competence Center)

23 tips for getting organized, streamlining your online time, managing your media and more

In this Computerworld article, the writer gives several great tips on getting your geeky side in order. I’m happy to note that procurement of a Fujitsu ScanSnap and scanning your life to PDF made number 4 on his list.

Other useful tips include topics such as cable management solutions (for that rat’s nest of wires), Google Desktop search and Google Sync, online identity management, and protecting your children online.

Check it out: How to simplify your tech life (Computerworld)

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin

A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life?

In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and the raging wildfires closing in on his city have made it clear to him that it is critical to protect whatever can be easily preserved in digital form.

Mike gives a sound strategy, starting off with a fast pass at just getting it digitized with little regard for perfection, followed by more focused efforts.

He pointed out how some objects just aren’t as important as the memories that they represent, illustrating this with a photograph of his son’s martial arts trophies that he has since donated to various organizations.

Mike makes it very clear that backups are mandatory. My kind of guy!

Here’s the whole article: Why you should digitize ‘everything’ (Computerworld.com)

Here are a few thoughts I have to share on these great media library projects. Not only are they never-ending, but the longevity of the task should guide some key decisions you make as you plod along.

Accept that it’s Never Going to End

I currently have ongoing projects to scan in every scrap of paper in my house, rip every CD to MP3, and scan in every pre-digital-era photograph. But the corpus is just too large. And I haven’t even considered ripping video; I have accepted that a full digital video library is a little too ambitious for me these days.

We need to be aware of this from the very beginning; if you feel like you bit off more than you can chew, you are normal.

Never Give Up

Try to keep your goals clear, so that you don’t lose steam and give up. Perhaps you are looking forward to being able to place the plastic boxes all in storage. Perhaps you can’t wait to be able to make those uber party mixes from your rich collection. In any case, every hour you spend doing the drudgery of ripping CDs brings you a little closer to these goals.

Prioritize Your Work

It is a whole lot better to spend your first days ripping your favorite music to MP3 than to be ripping some weird CDs your roommate left behind in college. Today I happily skipped over the Talking Heads CDs that I inherited from my brother—those don’t really need to be in my iTunes library, do they?

Keep it Simple

Make your work flow as simple as possible. You may still be doing this in three years—don’t over complicate things.

I have been working on my own collection for the past three years. When I first started, I was ripping the music on a PC using a tool called cdex to rip the MP3s and another tool called Mp3tag to edit the tags. These days I use iTunes on my Mac to do both of these tasks. If I had some really fancy work flow going, it might not have been so easy to change machines. By keeping things simple, I was able to do exactly the same thing today that I did three years ago.

Choose Good Settings

…for your software. You don’t want to have to do this again, do you? And don’t go cheap on the bit rate, if you have the space.

In addition, you will probably want to decide between the convenience of a universal format versus the power of a proprietary or niche format. In my example, I opted to use MP3 for all of my music instead of some of the other, more powerful, formats available. I was stung once by the switch from PC to Mac where the handful of CDs that I had ripped to .wmf files were no longer usable.

If you are ripping everything to some killer lossless format, be sure you are looking far down the road and considering compatibility issues.

Back it up!

Make sure your backup process is ready for the increased load. If your backups consist of burning DVDs (or worse, CDs) of your data, you will very quickly tire of this, and you may just abandon one of the most important parts of your work flow. Oh, and remember, if there aren’t two copies in separate places, it isn’t a backup.

A couple of months ago I bought two of those nice pocket-size portable hard drives, and I always leave one at the office and I swap them once per week. This works for me: they are 320GB hard drives, providing plenty of room for all of my thousands of scanned documents, tens of thousands of photographs, and many thousands of MP3s, with plenty of elbow room.

When ripping a CD collection, the data risk is lower since you still retain the original CDs, but it still is a lot of work to rip them all. Don’t overlook the backup, or you will cry when the hard drive crashes.

Know Where You Have Been

Come up with a simple “bread crumb” mechanism to know where you have already been. You want to be able to quickly identify the music CDs you already ripped, without having to bring up iTunes every time. Keep the three year horizon in mind, so you choose a technique that will not be mysterious to you after some time passes (Hmmmm…. did I dog ear the corner of the CD insert to mark it? Where did I put that notebook where I wrote them down?)

I chose simplicity: I have one of those nice metallic Sharpie markers, the silvery kind. I put a small dot on the hub of each CD after I ripped it, just above the center hole. This way, several years from now, I should easily be able to spot the CDs that haven’t been introduced to my digital library.

I do this with photographs as well. As I scan them, I put a small marker dot on the back of each photograph, in the corner.

Finally, Enjoy Your Music!

I am quite capable of getting all wrapped up in the process for the sake of the process. Don’t forget to actually listen to the music you ripped!

Not everyone who works with documents in the home will run into this problem, but sooner or later you are probably going to find yourself in a situation where you would like to email someone a useful document that just happens to have your social security number embedded in it, or your full name and address, or some other info that you would rather keep private.

This process of editing documents to remove sensitive content is referred to as redaction—that’s the keyword you probably want to be searching for as you tip toe through Google for guidance.

In this article I discuss the obvious problems we face using the most naïve approach toward document redaction, and provide some resources for better options.

The only sure way

The only absolutely certain way of guaranteeing that you cut out secret information would be to print the document, physically cut out the bad bits, scan in the document, and send the scanned PDF to your colleague. This may seem a bit extreme, but if you were an anonymous tipster sending the media a document full of mob-related evidence, containing your name, you might go this route (You probably don’t want to send the email from your personal account. Try a throwaway email account at the library.)

Other options… Microsoft Word

Don’t even think about sending a raw MS Word document to your recipient. There’s loads of hidden stuff within those documents that you might forget. If you really must, you can look into some recommendations from Microsoft, and consider tools such as Microsoft’s free Office add-in for removing hidden data.

Danger lurking in PDF documents

Since my paperless life really revolves around PDF documents, this is the most likely kind of document that I would be sending via email. Unfortunately, PDF documents have even more hidden data within than MS Office documents. Many people have been burned when they tried simple attempts at obscuring parts of a PDF.

A Simple Demonstration

I started with a nice PDF of the Declaration of Independence.

Now, supposing that we needed to send this document to a colleague, but we must not reveal the name of the original signer, we might try opening up the PDF in our favorite PDF markup tool and slapping a big fat rectangle over the sensitive information.

Now, all is good. But the enemy is crafty and they exploit the huge flaw in our thinking: the information never left the document. All they need to do is copy and paste:

A quick copy/paste from the PDF viewer application to Microsoft Word lets the whole world see that John Hancock is to blame! Better let him know we slipped up so he can take appropriate actions.

This sounds trivial, right?

In February, the Associated Press was able to uncover the secret details of the Facebook/ConnectU settlement using this same technique.

Apparently, the U.S. military has been caught in the same trap.

Last year, Google founder Larry Page’s home address info was leaked in a similar fashion.

How about Scanned Documents?

Up to this point I was working with a document that had been printed to PDF, thereby preserving the document text perfectly.

What about a document that we scan in?

Here’s some honest-to-goodness missile plans…

This is an excerpt from a scanned copy of the U.S. patent for the venerable Sidewinder Missile, complete with a black square that I have added to obscure some special information.

As seen here, the copy/paste trick still worked.

But why does it still work? Because the document had OCR run on it in the past.

A brief look at Acrobat’s document inspector tool shows the hidden secrets:

All of the red text above is hidden text. The actual hidden text is displayed by itself in the box on the right side of the screen above. It isn’t very pretty, but it has all of the details.

Proper Redaction

If you are concerned about keeping your secrets secret, do a bit of research into the tools available. You want to be absolutely certain that you don’t pass along any more information than you intend to.

Adobe Acrobat Professional comes with tools to do just this, and I show their use here:

You can see that I have used a redaction tool to select scanned text. Acrobat is selecting the hidden text as well as the bitmap image of the page. Once I apply the redaction, you can see the result below:

Now when my enemy tries the old copy/paste trick, the stuff between 38 and said means is totally blank, as intended.

Summary

I covered a very simplistic form of redaction here as well as a very simple way of getting around someone’s naïve censoring. Don’t stop here. You should use your PDF editor to search the metadata and hidden text for any terms you don’t want made public. You may wish to strip all metadata from your documents.

This is a topic that has been covered in depth by many, particularly in the legal field. Here’s a few articles worth reading on the topic:

Control metadata in your legal documents (Microsoft)

Redaction and Metadata Removal eSeminar (Acrobat for Legal Professionals)

Redacting PDF files with Acrobat 8 (AcrobatUsers.com)

Of course, it is only a matter of days, or even hours, before the new glow has worn off and I begin to grouse about the things I wish they had done and I grumble about the nit-picky little bugs that are always there.

Even when the program works perfectly, we often want to use it in a work flow, using each program for what it does best.

Work flow is inherent in the kind of work that we do when scanning, indexing, searching, filing, tagging, and backing up all of our documents, photos, music, and video. Once you are committed to digital media, you will find that you often need to cobble together different programs in order to do away with some of the tedious manual labor.

Scripting tools can be as simple as macro recorders, as fancy as drag-and-drop pipelining tools, and as complex as full programming languages. Choose one that fits you and use it to bridge the gaps in your work flow.

An Example

I have never had a harsh thought about my sheet-fed scanner, the venerable ScanSnap S510m. But one thing has always annoyed me about the software package they provide: you can’t start scanning a new document until the OCR process is complete on the first.

What happens is this: you scan in a document; ScanSnap Manager receives it as a PDF and immediately passes it to Abbyy FineReader for OCR. All is good at this point.

But, the OCR process can take anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes, and if you were to scan in another document, FineReader complains:

This is where a little bit of AppleScript magic smoothed over this minor work flow annoyance.

I found that you can attach a bit of AppleScript as a “folder action” to a folder, and when a file appears in that folder, your AppleScript gets called. All I needed to do was figure out a way to get AppleScript to do the following:

• Wake up when a file appears
• Grab the first unprocessed PDF file
• Tell FineReader to start up, if it isn’t running
• Tell FineReader to open the file
• Wait for the processing to finish
• Go back to step 2 until all files are done.

It wasn’t exactly trivial—FineReader doesn’t actually have any special AppleScript support built in. But after a few experiments (i.e. a full weekend of fussing around) it was working smoothly.

Now I can scan as many documents as I want, knowing that OCR is happening at its own pace in a totally different flow.

Some day, when I have cleaned up the embarrassing bits of the code, I will share it here for fellow ScanSnap users.

What scripting tools are out there

The automation tools you use will depend on what software you are working with and what operating system you are using. On the Macintosh side, AppleScript and Automator will probably cover the bases. Things aren’t so pretty on the Windows side, but if you are willing to get a little dirty, Windows scripting can work miracles.

Whatever tool you use, I recommend finding as many simple examples on the Web as you can and running them and tweaking them slightly until you make them do what you want.

I am not an AppleScript programmer; I simply downloaded other people’s sample scripts that did file manipulations and poked and prodded them into shape.

AppleScript

In the Macintosh world, the old standby has always been AppleScript, with its quirky syntax that attempts to look like English. It is surprisingly easy to do some fairly heavy lifting with a minimal of effort.

In fact, though I find its syntax challenging and condescending at the same time, I heartily recommend AppleScript. The key is that Apple has built in AppleScript support to most of the main Macintosh applications.

For a taste of what AppleScript can do, here’s a whole mess of cool scripts for automating iTunes.

Imagine running a script that builds playlists for you or tags files automatically or finds duplicates and marks them.

This is the main AppleScript site, and here’s a tutorial from Apple.

Automator

Another Macintosh product, that provides a more graphical approach to hooking your apps together, is Automator. Here is an article that gives a good overview of the tool.

This is what a simple work flow looks like in designer mode:

You can see more or less what is going on here: You use a predefined set of actions, on the left side, to build up a pipeline on the right side.

In this case, the new automation action will get the selected documents, sort them, combine them into one PDF document, and then open that document in a PDF viewer.

I have always been a little confused with the utility of this product: it’s great if your application provides Automator actions, but what do you do if your app is like FineReader, with no special hooks built in?

Nevertheless, with Automator, you can do some pretty fancy things with many common tasks such as file management, email, and browsing. And there are plenty of custom Automator actions out there for the downloading.

Both Automator and AppleScript are Macintosh OS X built-ins.

For the serious Mac user, there is Bash Unix shell scripting, but that’s all I’m going to say about that. It’s there if you want it!

Windows Scripting

Things are somewhat different on the Windows side.

On the positive side, I believe that Microsoft’s COM object architecture makes it possible to script some pretty fancy things using off-the-shelf software.

In addition, the Office suite has amazing macro facilities that have been used by many as a full programming language, as the core of many successful commercial products.

But Windows just doesn’t seem to have anything analogous to AppleScript for gluing things together without getting your hands too dirty.

As a trivial example of the power of the Windows COM architecture, this short script will launch Excel, create a fresh spreadsheet, and automatically feed in some data. To try it out, save the script to your desktop and double click it.

This is what I saw on my machine when I ran the script:

Just like AppleScript on the Macintosh side, many Windows applications provide hooks for scripting.

The down side is that the scripting language is much more like a programming language, so it’s more comparable to writing shell scripts than to using a drag-and-drop automation tool like Automator.

But when you do the same thing over and over every day, it may be worth it to roll up your sleeves and get down and dirty with some VBScript.

An added benefit of this approach is that the language shares much of its functionality with Visual Basic for Applications, found in Word and Excel macros. If you are writing standalone Windows scripts, you can also write very complex Word and Excel macros. You also have the ability to do much of the same application automation within Word/Excel macros.

AutoIT

This is a freeware tool that many use for scripting their applications.

From the product website:

• Easy to learn BASIC-like syntax
• Simulate keystrokes and mouse movements
• Manipulate windows and processes
• Interact with all standard windows controls
• Scripts can be compiled into standalone executables
• Create Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)

What more could you ask for?

Closing Thoughts

There are other tools out there; don’t be afraid to check them out and try some of the examples. If you can automate just one annoying task that you do every day, it may be worth the hassle of spending a weekend writing the script.

Epilogue

Yesterday at work I finally rolled up my sleeves at work to tackle a nagging document problem that had been lingering for months.

We have a large quantity of PowerPoint slide decks that have critical company information embedded within. I work in the pharmaceutical industry, so many of those PowerPoint slides had chemical structures for various drug molecules embedded within as OLE objects.

The problem was that we wanted to extract that knowledge (the molecule files) electronically and text mine the slides, but our tools did not support PowerPoint. They did, however, support Microsoft Word.

How could I convert the slides to Word documents? There are dozens of ways on the Net to go in the other direction, but the only way to do what I wanted resulted in the OLE objects being converted to pictures—no good for my purpose. I did find that a copy/paste of each molecule from PowerPoint to Word worked correctly, but who wants to do that by hand with hundreds of documents?

After weeks of trying to find a real Microsoft developer at work to do the task, I finally gave in and tried my hand using VBScript and the Windows Scripting Host. In four hours I had the basics of a script going.

My simple VBScript file does the following:

• Prompt the user for a PowerPoint file and target directory
• Launch PowerPoint and Word in the background
• Loop through every slide, inspecting any OLE objects found within to see if it was created by ChemDraw or IsisBase Sketch, two common chemistry editor tools
• If any such molecules are found, the following happens:
  • All of the “shapes” on the slide are copied to the clipboard
  • A new Word document is created with “Slide (1..n)” appended to the file name
  • The clipboard contents are pasted into the document

Sure, there are plenty of warts to work out, but I was happy to be able to run my script and watch as it magically consumed huge slide decks and spit out Word documents containing the exact data I was looking for. Windows Scripting Host is a powerful tool, as good as, if not better than AppleScript.

[Update: Added epilogue singing the joys of Windows Scripting Host]

If you are looking for step-by-step checklists and good solid advice about putting your digital life in order, then this book is for you.

The author covers a very broad swath of digital media, discussing topics such as video, music, and photography. She provides clear guidelines for prioritizing your efforts and crisp checklists.

In addition, this up-to-date book (January 2009) provides a good source of information about the leading software products available, with advice on features to look for. For example, while discussing photo management software, she mentioned the advantage of being able to select a large group of photographs and batch-rename them to something like “Egypt 001.jpg” through “Egypt 100.jpg”

The book gets geeky enough to whet the palate, without going too far. Topics such as EXIF data and nitty gritty settings for scanning photos are covered in depth.

Here’s the book on Amazon

A list of several useful hardware and software tools with which to arm yourself before you attack the file cabinet.

When I first became interested in woodworking, I checked out several books on the subject from the library. Invariably, within the first two or three chapters, there was an illustrated list of desirable hand tools for a woodworker’s workbench.

No one ever actually goes out and buys everything shown on those pages; they start with the essentials and build up a collection over time. And so it is with this list I give you of useful tools of the trade.

Staple Remover

Such a simple little device, but so important. My wife staples everything together, then she hands me a stack of old bills to be scanned in, complete with staples.

Don’t bother with those ones that have jaws. Get one of the stick kind, like this one.

Paper Cutter

I wouldn’t buy one unless I had lots of manuals and such to scan, but this is a device that can really speed things up. Just remove the staples from the spine and then start chopping through the centers of the pages, in small stacks.

If you have too much work for a paper cutter, you can always take the manuals/magazines to a professional office center and have them do the job.

Paper shredder

It’s a sad commentary on modern times that most people these days have a paper shredder in the house. Yours should be strong enough to do the job without overheating and should chop the paper into proper tiny bits.

Flatbed Scanner

This is where everyone starts. Nobody goes out and buys a sheet-fed scanner as their first scanner; the price is often prohibitive, and the devices are very task-specific.

Even if you have invested in a sheet-fed scanner, it is good to keep a flatbed scanner around to scan in things such as hard book covers or pages that you don’t want to remove from a book.

Sheet-fed Scanner

The most important part of a serious document scanning exercise.

The ability to scan in twenty or thirty pages in a minute, both sides, makes this expensive device stand head and shoulders above all flatbed scanners.

I use the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M.

You might want to check out Terry White’s Tech Blog’s comparison of the NeatReceipts, ScanSnap S300, and ScanSnap S510M. He did a great video showing the three in operation.

OCR software

Without OCR software, your documents are not searchable. Fortunately, most scanners come bundled with some kind of OCR software. Mine came with both Abbyy FineReader as well as Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.

External backup drive

So important. Your data has to be in two places.

Backup software

Sure, you can manually copy files from your desktop to the backup drive, and I did this for a long time. It’s better to automate this process.

Backup software helps prevent accidental erasure of either the source or the target data, and it helps you perform the backups regularly and painlessly.

I personally use rsync scripts to do the job, though this may be a bit too geeky for some. Many external hard drives come bundled with quality utilities. You can even consider using online backups such as Mozy or Carbonite.

PDF editing software

A definite plus once you begin scanning larger documents. You want to be able to merge documents, rotate pages, and move pages around with ease.

For example, I just finished scanning in a tri-fold owner’s manual that I cut on the folds. The first sheet had page 1 and 6 on it, the middle sheet had page 2 and 5 on it, and the last sheet had page 3 and 4 on it.

When the document went through the scanner, I had a PDF with 1,6,2,5,3,4 page order. It was a breeze to drag the pages into the correct order.

I use the Preview app from Mac OS X for this. Adobe Acrobat does the job quite nicely as well.

Document Management software

This is the repository where you keep your documents. I have mixed feelings about document management software.

On the one hand, these products are very good at what they do and they certainly make it easier to organize documents.

On the other hand, as soon as you commit yourself to one document management tool, it is difficult to migrate your collection to a new tool, should you need to switch in the future.

That said, I use a tool called Yep for this purpose. One of the other major players out there is DEVONthink.

Keyboard macro software

I find myself doing certain repetitive tasks from time to time that require multiple clicks or keystrokes. For example, when I am reviewing a scanned document, I scroll through the document looking for pages that were accidentally rotated 90 or 180 degrees by the scanning software.

The tool I use for previewing and editing (the Preview app from Mac OS X) supports rotating single pages, but it asks you each time “Do you want to rotate the current page only or the entire document?”

After tiring of clicking through that question every time, I used my macro software to write three keyboard macros, and I assigned them to ⌘-Left, ⌘-Right, and ⌘-Up, for Rotate Left, Rotate Right, and Rotate 180. Now I can quickly browse through a document, flipping and rotating any pages that need it.

I use Keyboard Maestro for this job.

File management utilities

As soon as you start juggling hundreds of files around and renaming them and moving them into different folders, you find yourself performing certain repetitive tasks, that can often be made easier by software.

I use a tool called A Better File Renamer for the Mac that allows me to rename large numbers of files, following dozens of customizable rules. This tool allows you to package renaming scripts into a “droplet” on the desktop, where you can drop files.

One of my droplets adds the file creation date to the filename as a prefix. Another droplet converts filenames with embedded dashes and underscores into “title case” names with spaces.

I recently bought a folder management utility called The Big Mean Folder Machine that allows easy creation of folder hierarchies, such as by automatically splitting files into groups of 100. I haven’t used it much yet, but I sure love the icon!

Encryption utility

Gotta have it if you are putting your intimate personal information into digital form. Anything with your SSN or your credit card numbers should be protected. Remember, even if it’s on your home desktop machine, a burglar would take the whole machine, and happily sift through your personal data looking for info that could be stolen.

For some things I use encrypted volumes on Mac OS X; for others, I use TrueCrypt.

Assortment of Thumb Drives

What better way to move your digital documents around? They don’t even need to be that large. Cheap throwaway thumb drives these days have the capacity to hold a lifetime of digital documents. But make sure you protect sensitive data!

[Update: Added a link to Terry White's scanner review]