Technology Scanning and organizing notes automatically, proof of concept.

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Does this concept sound useful to you?

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  • Not sure what you are even talking about.

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  • Total voters
    2

ReviewR

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Hey everyone!

I have figured out an easy way to take notes, scan them into PDFs, and organize them automatically. I am not claiming my idea is unique by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it would be a boon to people who are in medical school.

It basically involves using a cover-sheet with a bar-code for each stack of notes that you have. These cover-sheets can be created really easily, and you can have one (or more) for each class. It will all make sense in the video. These cover-sheets allow the program to split the pdf into different documents and uses the barcode to name the file. These files can then be sent to the appropriate folder.

I have created a few posts on the subject on a new blog, though the first post is more my musings on the subject of organization. More importantly, I have created a video that shows proof of concept. I will be working on a full set of instructions over the weekend. I am still trying to simplify the set up process, which is why I haven't posted instructions for this yet. I hope to use your feedback to improve the instructions I already have. (This is my first attempt at blogging and making videos, and any constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.)

You can find everything here:

http://bme2md.wordpress.com/



If you have any questions, please feel free to PM me or comment on the video or blog. I hope you find this useful!

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@ReviewR, great poof of concept and great demo video. I'm obsessed with automation and efficiency (and currently design a lot of automation workflow in my current IT career), and I like the use case of finding available software (are they freeware by the way?) to streamline the process. Curious about the PDFs created: are they image-based PDFs or is their some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) magic involved that understands text? That would be the icing on the cake (text indexing) not only for smaller file size PDFs but also insane searchability.
 
@Stroganoff

Just now saw your post Stroganoff. Not sure why I didn't get an email notification. Thanks for your support and interest! The barcode generator and file mover applications are freeware, A-Pdf service is a full feature version that leaves a water mark, otherwise, $99. I think I saw something on their site about free versions of software if you promote their products, though I haven't looked into that yet.

As far as your questions of OCR are concerned, this is one of the areas I am looking into next. I have found a few programs that do OCR automatically using a 'hot folder' as it is often called. Technically, my scanner has OCR capabilities, but I never used it because I doubt it is any good. The programs with automatic OCR I have found are essentially enterprise level, some costing a few thousand. I would love to learn to do this myself, but honestly I think this is far beyond my abilities within the next year. I am going to keep looking for a good fit for this workflow. Right now I am trying out the enterprise software ABBYY FlexiCapture Engine. It does everything else I want to do, but since it costs so much, I am just using it's automated OCR while I still have a trial

I looked into OneNote and Evernote as a way of getting OCR, but there is no native pdf support in these programs. By that I mean, it doesn't work by accessing the files from within the windows folder architecture, it imports them and turns them into searchable images. For some, this might be enough, but I am hesitant to invest everything into a proprietary architecture for organization that makes switching to new services difficult. I want to maintain a copy of everything within the windows folder hierarchy, and make it accessible with dropbox or something similar. I am sure you understand what I am talking about.

Thanks again for your kind words. Let me know if you have any other questions or ideas to add to this!
 
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