Having scanned files in records?

[JMF]

I suspect this is a simple one, but then I'm new to this. I'm interested in
the idea of transforming my paper archives into scanned archives.

Of course, I could just scan documents and thrown the PDFs into a directory.

But it occurred to me that it would be even nicer to have those scanned PDFs
somehow in a database, so that I could search for things, etc.

So I was thinking about the design of the records:

tblScannedDocs

TheDate
Description
TheScannedDocItself

What I'm wondering is, what's the best way to handle TheScannedDocItself? I
can imagine two possibilities:

- Put the scanned doc itself into the field. I suppose that's the famous
"blob" idea. I don't even know whether Access supports this. But that, of
course, would lead to a huge database (in terms of storage).

- Put a link to the scanned doc in that field. That would assume that the
docs, say, are in the same directory as the database file, but I wouldn't
have any problem with that. Since the scanned doc would be a scanned PDF, it
wouldn't be a "link" in the sense of a real link to an Excel file's
contents, but rather ... well, I suppose it would just be a link to the file
in the directory, right?

Any words of wisdome from experienced folks on handling this kind of issue?

Many thanks!

John

 

[chris.nebinger]

If you saved them in a BLOB (OLE field), then you could link to them
easily enough. However, this will not enable you to search the text
of the PDF. For that, you would need MSN Desktop Search, Google
Desktop Search, or some other searching engine.



Chris Nebinger

 

[JMF]

Thanks, Chris, I'll look into the BLOB technique. I didn't know about OLE
fields.

I'm not ambitious enough to want to search the actual PDFs themselves, so
that's not a problem (at least yet). I just want to have a few fields in the
database itself I can search, mostly dates and that sort ot simple thing.

Thanks again,

John