This is my first post. I have been searching for an easy way to organize my plats and jobs (field notes and reference plats). We have thousands and thousands of hand drawn surveys. Most are 8 1/2 x 11 and a few thousand are 11 x 17 and still more that are large format. Since 1990 we have been storing our originals in filing carbonates organized by County, district, and land lot. We had a fire about a year ago and some of our originals were destroyed by water damage. I am now trying to make them all digital so that we will never lose our records.
I have been using an OCR to scan the newer AutoCAD jobs so that I can search by street address or land lot or whatever. I store them in folders labels with the job number. Now the tricky part comes in. I can not use the OCR engine to scan the thousands of plats that are hand drawn. It will not recognize the text unless it is typed.
So my questions are:
What kind if organization software do you use?
Does it organize just plats or an entire job folder?
How much does it cost?
Any help would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.
-Michael
Just a thought - what if you were to use software to generate labels, print them, and affix them to the hand drawn plans? You could do the same for field notes and paper files for cross referencing as well.
Then, I assume the OCR would recognize the information and you can file accordingly.
In other words, it sounds like your filing system is good, you just need to adapt your older plans to it.
And to answer your original question, my current company uses a system that cross references Tax Map and Lot numbers to project number and client name. The information for the project is stored in Excel, with the paper files filed by project number in file drawers, and plans organized by project number in the flat files.
All the projects are archived onto CD, with a backup of the entire CD Library stored on an external, which is regularly backed up offsite through Carbonite.
This office also has paper only files which seem to be deteriorating on a daily basis. I am scanning when there is time, but the process is slow.
P.S. - Welcome to Surveyor Connect!
Prepare to receive many answers. You have a very worthy discussion topic. Welcome aboard.
Creating the perfect indexing system is the trick. What might be best for me would probably not work well for you. I'm in PLSSia so section, township and range rule outside of city limits. Within the dozens of cities where we do work, the number and types of subdivisions/additions vary tremendously. One town of less than 10,000 population has nearly 200 subdivisions/additions and none of them match the town name. In another town of similar size, there is the original town and only about 10 additions. Using the tax i.d. might work fairly well if I could remember what 014-25-03-00000-0004-017.3 really means.
Welcome.
Organizing your prior work via a geographic location as you say your currently doing is the best in my mind. (google earth) Someway that you can find them and or know that you have previous work in a particular area works great. We typically do section, township, range out here for our work.
Getting your hand drawn records to digital, is another matter. First, I would say scan all of them to tiff files and have them as a record. 3rd party companies will do this. At that point you could trash the originals or keep. You could always re-print the scanned tiff as is. Second if you want to go through the process of converting all of your prior records into cadd be prepared to spend either a lot of time, or a lot of money.
I would approach it one job at a time, on an as needed basis. There are many companies out there offering a conversion of Hand Drawings to cadd at real scales and a best guess that matches your current layering standards. Last time I did one (2005) it cost $60 which was far cheaper than I could have anyone in-house do it.
You might want to look into Deja vu.
I don't think I would invest time in a textual database. Instead I would put everything into Google Earth.
Of course, if you kept all of your jobs in "My Places" in GE, it would be too bogged down to run. But you could have separate kml files for each section or subdivision, and load them when needed.
We've spent a long time entering old job, plan and client data into a database, with everything x-referenced. It's got municipal and legal addresses, centroid coords, various descriptive text fields. The present database system -- iPJC -- is now web-based, and we've made it available for free.
Very, very cool. I took a quick look and it's ... robust...
Might I suggest a link over in the freeware thread?
> ..in the freeware thread
which is ... where?
GIS. You don't need to map it just get the files in the database so you could search by location. Get in the map and search a box and any files you have in the area would list out. That's where its all headed anyway, surveys attached to the parcel layer of GIS.
We use ArcGis for our filing and I would recommend the map. We record monuments and benchmark locations as well. This makes for a very quick reference for quoting new jobs and its easy to hyperlink surveys and field notes. Initial cost was about 10 grand, but its saves a ton of time. Good luck.
I like this idea. One of the counties in my area use Djvu to record their recorded plats and an online viewer to search and print. I have used this format before but I never realized how small the file size was because the quality was great. The Ducument Express program that converts 300 dpi scans to djvu AND has an OCR engine is only $150. If the OCR is good enough to read my hand drawn words this would save weeks of data entry.
mpossjr
mpossjr ,
Could you let us know if DJ makes the text in your maps searchable?
Thanks,
Steve
mpossjr
Yes I will. I have already installed the trial version. I will give it a go and report back.
DjVu quick review
With the Document Express Enterprise edition I can create a watch folder and any document that goes into the folder will automatically be scanned with the OCR and converted to DjVu format. I tried about 10 to see how it worked. It ran through those 10 in about 10 seconds. The output quality was great. It matched the 300 dpi scan and prints perfect. It also reduced my file size for a scanned TIF @ 300 dpi from 169kb to 84kb. So that cut my storage space in 1/2!
The bad news is that the OCR only picked up some of the hand written text. Which is not good enough for me. I will still use the DjVu format but I will most likely use my label maker to print labels with plat information and stick them on the backs and scan double sided.
After that I can just find a user-friendly indexing software to search through the files. I'm still open for ideas if anyone finds something easier.
DjVu quick review
Thanks mposs.