I have recently been looking into how I can get a pile of paperwork into digital format.

Some of the paperwork is just line drawings (worksheets for a kindergarten/nursery teacher i.e. join the dot's and match the shapes etc etc), and some of it is in the form of printed magazine articles.

Now I know that the most basic way of storing this, would be to scan the "stuff" in and just store them as digital images, then maybe burn them to cdr.

But, as some of the drawings will need a little image editing, and some of the magazine stuff will need "OCR'ing" to get rid of fancy borders, irrelevant caption boxes and other "DPT" type stuff (we just need to retain the text), and that really, it needs to be searchable (by either title or by keywords)

What is the best way to do this?

Also, it would be very convenient if I could store the paperwork into some sort of "database" (I don't even know if that's the correct term for what I want to do, or if "storage library" would be more accurate).

As for databases, I have seen MS access at work, but this is in the form of basic tables, where information is added daily, using tables, and the info for the particular file (at work it's transport related, and updates the records for the usage of Trucks) just adds further detail.

Whereas, I need to be able to just keep the files, once stored, as a library of information - that wouldn't be changed, but I really need to be able to add further new documents or drawing images (probably as new files), and be able to search for them as there would be upwards of 1000 documents (and I don't understand whether this would be a large pool of information or not).

I have searched the net, and I'm getting completely lost in acronyms and overly technical terminology as to what I need to do to accomplish this - I suspect that it maybe "reasonably" straightforward, but at the moment, I'm stuck.

Could anyone point me in the right direction please?

regards

John

p.s. So far I have only managed to find a "sort of" howto, that may help, it's about using Openoffice, ODBC and MySQL - I have openoffice installed, but as to what the ODBC and MySQL can do, god alone knows. The "Howto" goes on about servers and stuff like that, that I have little knowledge and no understanding about. Thanks.