Scanning mylars, et al

First you have to figure out the most economical way to get your map scanned. If you do not have very many maps it may be less expensive to hire somebody to scan your maps. Large format scanners can cost as much as $15,000. Another option would be to contact your local county surveyor, who probably has a large format scanner, you may be able to work out a deal where you scan your maps and an equivalent amount of county records. Most county surveyors office have many many maps that they would like to have scanned, but do not have the time or money to hire someone to do it. Next you up to choose a database program to access the scanned images. Most any database program should work, Microsoft access or something similar. Our office has hundreds of thousands of records survey records that is in a database and tens of thousands of images that have been scanned I feel that we probably have the most organized and useful survey database around. But that is just my opinion.

You may want to check and see if your county surveyor has already scanned your dad's mylars. For instance if you were working in my county we would have already scanned and indexed your survey maps into a database system, which is available. That is one of the advantages of living or working in a recording state

If you do not have room in your laptop,
you can store them at the Microsoft Sharepoint Cloud
(up to 25G)

You can access them from your laptop, office, or smartphone.

We actually use an OCE' printer/scanner and it scans mylars great. We have one county (Palm Beach) that is now asking for reverse mylars (black with white lettering/lines) but that can be handled digitally. Mind you, these things are a little expensive, probably 4 or 5 grand....