On 04/07/2013 05:56 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
Ok, the organization is the Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach CA. We have been around since 1913. I recently got stuck with the job of Church Historian and am concerned about the closet full of records going back to day one. Record organization is virtually non-existent. Our minister recently tried to put together a quick history and it took her 2 weeks of digging to find anything. We also have problems like Board meeting minutes with motions that have long since been forgotten. There is a small but constant demand for information on past events (especially pictures). There are other needs too numerous to list here.On 4/8/13, Gary Roach<gary719_list1@verizon.net> wrote:Hi all, I have a records archiving problem and don't know where to start. There are 100 years of records that include hand written material, type written hard copy, photos and a lot of email. I would like to have a system based around mysql (if possible) that would allow flexible data mining.How many records? How many people will be "entering" these records? Are you going to OCR or type some of them, or just scan them in and record data about each record? "flexible data mining" sound a bit sales pitch-y, but that might just be me. Is this for you, or a company, or a library? Or do you want to write some software to do this sort of thing? Or is it a University project?
I agree that data mining is the latest buzz word out there but couldn't think of a better description for what I need. Being able to retrieve date by categories and then sub-categories would be essential.
As for as OCR vs retyping vs scan and preses - still up in the air at this point. I suspect that all three methods might be used.
We have some really sharp computer types that maintain our database, email and web site but no one is working with archiving. I would like to be able to cut something like mySQL to our needs (some minimal experience here) but really don't know how to put such a system together. A good book on the subject or or an extensive on line treatise would help.
Gary R.