The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/EarorForofor on 2025-01-16 03:16:51.
Hi
I'm a genealogist (hobby/nonprofessional) and I'm running into a project that I think the group here has better advice than my rampant manic googling.
I have a lady who's been doing this since the 60s. She's got a personal archive of an estimated 100,000 documents. She's also 94 and in a nursing home. I want/need to archive all of her collection in a digital format to preserve it, as we may not be able to find a physical home for everything she has after she passes.
Secondly I want this to be the start of a larger scale archiving program. There are hundreds of people I'm in contact with who have amassed thier family histories, and as we move into the future we risk losing it all to fire, famine, and family.
Personally I've been using my cell phone to archive by just using a bendy mount and my S-pen to snap pictures, but would like to scale up to a system designed for something like this. I've also used my vupoint magic wands with varying results.
I'm looking at scanners like the CZUR systems and the Scansnap sv600, because it's the most non destructive option. I also own two DSLRs (one with 4k) which I've used to document larger scale items like paintings and homes.
The issue I run into is that I'm left with photos full of extra space, not a nice clean square like the CZUR program is providing. Perhaps it's just me not finding the correct app, but sitting and cropping everything down sounds like driving splinters into my tearducts.
I would also like to build a kind of kit with a simple small Chromebook and some kind of scanner that I could ship to an older person who could snap and go, with a simple tutorial zoom from me. I'm not looking for full archival quality. Just something legible, simple to use, and small enough to ship. I think one of the cheaper czur would work fine with this, but what's your opinion?
Most of what I work with is flat paper, though I do have a couple books that need scanning that can't be destroyed, or brought to my house where I could build that cool box from the Archivist.
Next is what to do with all of it, but I'm going to read through the reddit first before I ask dumb questions.