How to digitize old documents

Why digitize document

I am the a person enjoying joining lots of workshop, conference and seminar. After years, I started to realized my place has stacked with lots of  hangouts and documents.

I always think it may be useful if I can access these documents some day in the future. I think I will find some free time to read it again. But, to be honest,  I NEVER did. Recently, I try to find some solutions to digitize these documents in order to gradually get rid of them and reorganize them by the way of making them PDF files. When I need them “someday”,  I can just put the scanned documents in my iPad and read them again. Now, I am really happy that my place is getting cleaner again! If you are also struggling with the same situation or look for a way to digitize documents, my experience may help you in certain way. Anyway, I will first discuss the simplest and most affordable way I found, and some alternative method in the future.

Step by step scan your documents

The thing I want to do is easy: Scan them and abandon it immediately! 

However, the next thing I’ve encounter is the scanner targeting this market is still  expensive, or not good for non-smooth surface scanning such as a book with certain amount of thickness. I made my choice to use the smartphone APP as the scanner. I found most of APP works better when the document is flat not in a curve shape like an opening book. Since we are planning to throw it away, we can just DISSASSEMBLE them!! Good quality scanning document can then be achieve easily with most of scanning mobile APPs in iOS and Android system.

Preparation

We first need to get a cutting mat, utility knife, importantly a metal ruler.

The reason we choose the metal ruler is because it is more durable that the plastic ones.

Remove the fixing part

The handout generally has two binding method: stapling or perfect binding. 

The stapler can be easily removed, the perfect binding book was harder to take apart. We can then disassemble it by cutting the edge of the book. In this step, we need to remove about 4~5 mm from the border of the book with utility knife. 

This is done by one hand firmly holding the ruler and the other hand cutting the book edge about 20 times at the same line. It takes about 2~3 mins for a book and I know you can make it!

Here is how we have done after removing the book edge by cutting it out!! Now, it become slice of papers again. They are easier for scanning with most mobile scanning Apps on the market.

Good scanning background

The most efficient way to scan the document with Apps is by taking photos with a distinguishable background like colors of green, blue or black.

I tried several time with different background, I found the good segmentation result can be easier achieve by placing the documents in front of any kind of backgrounds that has great color difference comparing to your document.

The advantage with good scanning background is that we can process it faster if the software can find the boundary of the document correctly most of the time. However, if sometimes it doesn’t,  we will have to adjust it manually in the software.

Tricks to flatten the documents

In order to flatten the paper, we can sticking some tapes on the scanning background mats. I made the tapes by this way: first, stick a Scotch magic tape on the mat, second, stick a double side tape on the scotch tape, lastly pear of the magic tape-double sided tape from the mat, flip it over and stick the double sided tape side to the mat. The thing we are doing here is to fix a Scotch magic tape facing up to the document placing side in order to fix the document at the bottom, (Since there is still no this kind of double side Scotch magic tape product at the market, we can just make one.)

The home-made double-sided magic tape can be place in a region area of the scanning document to be places. They generally don't hurt the document and can help to reduce the couverture curling edge problem if the paper is not fully flat.

Scan the documents

Now let’s scan the document by putting them on the top of mat one by one. I choose to use the CamScanner as the main tool because the edge of paper can be located more correctly automatically compare to others (This will save you lots of time). Also, they provide the folder-like structure for us to organize documents like a handout or a book(right). 

Although the APP will find the boundary points correctly most of time, you can still drag the point at the corner and edge if you find it has been place at wrong position.

The document will be cropped, transform and processing to the one at right.

Read it everywhere you want

By outputting all the PDF document, we now have successfully digitized it and the good thing is that you can read it everywhere on your iPad, mobile phone or even on your laptop. For me, the best thing is that I don’t need to live with these document, papers or handout anymore in my real life. Even we may abandon the paper form of document, we still keep it in some way in case we need to read it. We store them in the digital world without too much data storage space. Take it as a reference, the size of a 90 pages document is about 30 MBs. 

I recently fall in love with reading eBook on iPad. I found that even reading PDF on iPad is a luxury thing, because I can make notes on the App such as Notability, OneNote, Goodnotes, evernotes. Most of famous note taking software now can also synchronize documents between your devices instantaneously. Those are the words and highlighter I made in Notability, Oh, what a wonderful digital world :-D