Sharing Books on a Network

[ubercool]

Hi

I work in a small office where there are lots of technical literatures and manuals in hard copy which are used for reference. I would like to scan them and make a scanned copy available to all fifty employees in order to save these manuals from getting dog eared and lost. All computers are already connected on a network. Kindly guide me how can I do this?

 

[jmacavali]

Do you have any network shares setup now?

Do you realiaze how much work it will be to scan page by page every one of those books?

 

[foothead]

Scanning them is going to be a pain. The best way would be to carefully remove the binding, then put the pages in one of those scanners with the document feeder on top. You'll still need to reorder the scans if yours can't do both sides of the page in order.

 

[setishock]

It's going to be cheaper in man hours and accuracy to farm that out. It's going to be time consuming and tedious. On top of all that you're going to have to put that on a server with a search program.
If you scan them in you'd have to put them in pdf format so all the pages of a manual appear as one file.
I pity whomever you give that job to.

However you may want to check with the manual publisher to see if it's already in pdf format. If you weigh the cost of man hours versus cost of a pdf document from the publisher, you'll most likely come out ahead to buy the pdf version already made up.

 

[ubercool]

I already have a commercial scanner and seventy percent of the manuals are already available in pdf. Kindly guide me.

 

[jmacavali]

Guide you were? If 70% are already available in PDF, get them. Look for the other 30% or scan them yourself (or hire someone to do it). I don't think there is anything else we can tell you. It's time for you to make a decision and go with it.

 

[ubercool]

Yes I have made a decision to do it...kindly guide me how to make all these books available on a network so that everyone can read it without requiring a hard copy.

I have two unused desktop computers, can they be used as file servers? If yes, what is the procedure to do it?

Should I go for a client server configuration and install a server operating system in one of these computers or should peer to peer networking be used?

 

[threadmark]

Hi

I would like to scan them and make a scanned copy available to all fifty employees in order to save these manuals from getting dog eared and lost.

This is going to be your problem. Because you have over 15 computers, you will need to setup a file server capable of serving out up to 50 connections. Windows server 2003 or later should do this or a Linux equivalent.
Setup up a server first then we will talk.