Number 220 - September 2001
To Scan Or Not To Scan?
by Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, CGL
excerpt of an article from a recent issue of Ancestry.com,
as seen in Cajun Clickers Computer News, April 2001
    In my interactions with fellow family historians, I am frequently asked my opinion about scanning genealogical documents. The question poses several dilemmas, so I'd like to address the issue considering each of these dilemmas. I can remember when I first experienced scanning technology about 12 years ago. I was so excited about the idea that I soon started thinking of how I could use this technology in my genealogical research. My first inclination was to scan all of my genealogical documents.

    It sounded fun, but I had no practical reason to pursue this course. As it turned out, I only scanned two or three documents before I tired of the "fun" and realized this was a drain on time and resources. Of course, the technology of 12 years ago was nothing compared to what we have available today, but technology has never found a way to increase the amount of hours we have in a day. Yes, some applications can actually save you time in the long run, but others can encourage you to waste time. When it comes to scanning genealogical documents, I would have to put that activity in the "wasting time" category .

    Now, before I get a lot of hate mail, let me explain myself and make some qualifications. Scanning genealogical documents as graphics, just for the sake of scanning them, is what I consider the time waster. The reason is, most of the people I talk to are still having trouble getting their documents organized in the first place.

    I am a proponent of organizing your physical documents before all else. Since the problem is one of organizing --and therefore also one of time management--a better use of the precious hours we can devote to our favorite pastime would be to physically organize these documents so they are of more use to us. Adding the additional step of scanning these documents strains your resources, even though our technology is more advanced today than when I first tried this. The first wasted resource is time--the time spent scanning the document and ensuring that the image is true to the original, or better.

    The second wasted resource is physical storage space. So, to do the job justice, you should get a physical storage drive, such as a ZIP drive or a CD burner. Once you start scanning genealogical documents as graphic images, you're going to use a lot of digital storage space to save them. It's great if you have lots of money and storage space for multitudes of CDs or ZIP disks, but if not, reconsider this purpose for scanning your documents.
    There is one valid reason for scanning such documents, and that is to share them with others. If that's your reasoning, I recommend getting a CD burner and storing those images on CDs so your relatives can access them just as easily as you can. Even if you've scanned these documents, are they any easier to find now, and do you know what the documents contain? You will have the same problems in tracking digital documents as you do in tracking paper ones. Photos are the perfect documents to scan and share with others. Additionally, scanning photos can help preserve the images from deterioration so descendants can share the joy of seeing their ancestors.

    Most of the documents we bring home are photocopies, though, and don't need this type of protection. What about scanning text in documents? Well, that may be more useful to you in the long run--if you can get your OCR software to recognize what it is you're scanning. It may also be useful because, if you can successfully scan the text of a document, you can use and manipulate that text in your research.

    But I'm afraid that most of the documents we deal with in genealogy can't effectively be scanned for text--yet. Meanwhile, I recommend we work on organizing our physical documents before we add an additional step to this organizing process.

    Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CaRS, CGL, is the managing editor of "Genealogical Computing," editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists' newsletter "OnBoard," the creator of "Clooz"--the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, co-creator of the new family health history program "GeneWeaver," and a frequent contributor to " Ancestry ." She can be reached via e-mail at: liz@ancestordetective.com or gceditor@ancestry.com.

TOGGLE Editor's Note:
    Speaking of scanning: The source from which this was copied was formatted as all one paragraph. We have broken it into several paragraphs with the intention to make it easier to read. If it doesn't "scan" well, blame us--not the author.

    One of the problems with scanning "text", of course, is that it is not always in typewritten or typeset characters that the scanner's OCR1 software can recognize. Instead it is handwritten--sometimes poorly, and in several different cursive "styles". In a recent such instance, your editor physically misread the handwritten entry of his paternal grandmother's maiden name as "Black" when in fact, it was "Clark". Upon re-reading the entry you could interpret it either way.

   1 Optical Character Recognition
  Number 220 - September 2001