In July I received the news my older brother had passed away at age 61.  Jim was an aspiring, yet unpublished writer.  That was his goal and passion since high school.  For the past 35 years, he lived and wrote in Bisbee, an Arizona mining town that found a new life as an art colony, much like Aspen or Santa Fe.

When my sister and I went down to sort through his house, we made the decision to preserve his writings by scanning them—a perfect opportunity to really put the ScanSnap S1500 to the test.  But in sorting through his 2.5 tons of books and piles of papers, it was apparent that Jim never threw anything away.

During that 5 day trip, we put thousands of pages through the S1500.  But there was also a storage unit…

For our next trip to Bisbee for a wake with the extended family, we brought both the S1500 and the S300, each with its own notebook computer, and set up shop at a house we rented for the base of operations.  The storage unit had even more of his notes and manuscripts.  Clearly Jim had spent a lot of time and effort in his writing.  As a tribute, the family has published his last novel Out West via Amazon’s Createspace subsidiary.  We’re hoping as time unfolds we find the great American novel hiding in the papers we’ve preserved.

What I Learned
I couldn’t have designed a better test of a scanner’s paper handling than Jim’s lifetime of papers.  He had writings on an assortment of what seemed like 12 lb tissue paper, 100 lb card stock, 3 x 5 index cards, notebook paper, Chief tablets, spiral notebooks, sketch pads, and even bound journals.

Of course one feature of the S1500 and S300 that make them truly useful for large scale scanning projects is they are duplex scanners.  Not only does that save time, but it keeps the page order of a stack of pages as they are being scanned.  But what truly impressed me was the S1500’s ability to scan every different paper stock we gave it.  For the most part, if it fit, it scanned.  For example, for most of the spiral notebooks we just clipped the wire binding and scanned the entire notebook.  Most sheet-fed scanners would have a problem with this since the row of small holes drilled for the wire binding tends to make the pages stick to each other.  Also, with the S1500’s ultrasonic multi-feed detection sensor, any potential misfeeds were caught and let us quickly recover what might have been lost pages.

Without the S1500 and S300, there is no way we could have scanned as many pages of so many different kinds and sizes of paper as we did.  And if we didn’t scan the papers, I am sure we would have just thrown them away.

Now to find Jim’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel…

Gregg Marshall
CPMR, CSP
Speaker, Author, Consultant