Total Recall

by wschnell

25 years ago we worked together in a group that developed scanners. I have always been the software guy, while my colleague was and is a physicist, and a very universal one at that. Turns out Dr. B. has collected all the scientific papers and journals since he studied and at some point decided to make them into electronic material, maybe because the growing family needed the extra room.

Using a Canon DR-2010C he produced 1TB of scanned data, among it 30 years of 2 journals, and 20 years of 3 other ones, 60 thick ring binders, not counting the smaller batches of various other document types.

He is feeding the scanner in the evenings, and has the OCR done later during the nights.

Turns out this is his highly personalized lifelong collection of scientific knowledge, historically sorted and networked to his work experiences. We are looking at precisely the subject matters of one scientist here, now … how would your very own fulltext-searchable knowledge collection look like?