As I look around at my two thousand plus pieces of sheet music, music books, records, books and other assorted media, I wonder if it would be worthwhile to hire someone to scan and index my collection. I do usually locate what I need, but I have bought hymns/songs, etc., that I already own… Has anyone done this? Is there an established service that would do this for a fee?
Yes there are companies who do this, well the document scanning, not sure about the music format conversion. They usually do this for other businesses, not individuals, and the one I dealt with hired people close to or at minimum wage who do the scanning.
I use a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner to scan all kinds of stuff - sheet music, receipts, bank statements, etc. Mine is an older model (S510) that I’ve had for 6 years and it’s been perfectly reliable. And scanning couldn’t be easier - once the software is set up, all you do is put the document into the feeder and press the button. It magically appears as a searchable PDF file in the designated folder.
But it’s a sheet-feed scanner, and the major limitation is that it doesn’t work for bound documents that you aren’t willing to cut up. If most of your material is bound, or if it’s a one-time scanning job, you could send it all to a scanning service. Google search for “bound book scanning service” returns quite a few results. I think for 2000 pages total, it’d be cheaper to send to a service than to buy a good scanner.
IME, most scanning services (like Iron Mountain) charge a ridiculous amount if you send them bound, paperclipped, or stapled materials. Our law firm sends old files to be digitized and they charge so much it’s cheaper to have an employee here go through the file (at $15.00-$20.00 an hour) removing the paperclips and staples.
For books, I really like 1dollarscan.com as long as you don’t need the books back (they get destroyed a week or so after you download and OK the scan quality). It costs $15/1000 pages (1.5 cents per page), or cheaper if you do 10,000 pages.
They come back as indexed/searchable PDFs. I get all my print textbooks sent there to be PDFified so I don’t have to lug them around in a backpack.
They do documents too but it’s more expensive (10 cents per page instead of 1 cent per page for books). And you’d have to take care of music OCR on your own.
if you made a good filing system and had the space then you might just index.
give it a try. you need to develop a filing system and index procedure no matter who does it. take one or three hundred items and enter into an index. see if it works for you. it might be slow but you could do 25 entries a day.
compare to hiring the job out.