THE SHORT
Your help is needed! Do you have any documents physical or digital related to the running of VHS?
Physical files can be left in the dropbox with a note: “For Archives.”
Digital files or url can be sent to: archive.vhs@gmail.com AND/OR email to let me know where we can find the file or who to hunt down.
THE LONG
This could be you:
“One fateful day, you lift up a bottle of your [insert choice brew]. As you raise it to take a sip, you notice that the coaster you are using is actually a folded up copy of VHS’ [insert document type]. Taking the slightly damp document into your hands, you are overcome with a great sense of responsibility. You realize that a duty has been bestowed upon on you to play a part in ensuring that your beloved VHS would always have the records and information it needs to run smoothly and that even more importantly, its history and story would be preserved and easily recalled in the future. So you take what you have and pass it on to the VHS Archive for safe storage. And that evening, you fall asleep with a feeling of accomplishment and dream peacefully of [insert the most magical hacker project you can think of].”
DOCUMENT TYPES
What is the criteria for what we’re looking for? Anything related at to VHS’ operations. The table below gives you an idea of what we’re after (not limited to just these categories though):
We are now at ACTION 2 & 3 of the plan.
I’ll post a consolidated briefing soon on the different options we have for cloud storage of our files. If anyone has suggestions for what I should look into, let me know. So far, the options are: Flash Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive.
Additionally, I am in the process of digitizing (aka scanning) the physical files at the Hack Space. Do we have a scanner at VHS?
I am actually picking up a free one (a kind of monstrous sized printer/scanner/fax machine) on Monday so I could either take the files out of the space to scan at home or plant the machine at the space to work away at things there.
I’m hoping once we digitize everything, we can consider shredding old documents. Possibly move towards a paperless existence.
There’s a scanner at the workstation beside the laser cutter. I don’t think
anyone’s set it up yet, but feel free to get it installed on that computer,
or someone will be happy to help you if ask. Anything to help make your
life easier
Having dabbled in this area before, my recommendation is to find yourself a
scanner with a document feeder. I assume you’ll be working with standard
letter (8.5" by 11"), so this will take a lot of the tedium out of scanning
a large batch of documents.
Modern professional photocopiers have this feature, and can also scan to a
soft format like pdf. This might be an excellent opportunity to digitize
the existing backlog of waiver documents we have.
If you have enough documents to require a document feeder and you don’t
have access to one, let me know and I can do this at my place of work.
@wander Agreed. A document feeder would be necessary for multi-page items and it’s probably easier to scan all the (past) waivers in batches. The free printer/scanner I picked up has a feeder but we’ll see if it still even works. Scanning is pretty tedious even with a feeder, I’m not sure if you really want to do it at work but I shall log it down and I may employ your services.
Here is the breakdown for file storage options. I am leaning heavily towards Google Drive. Only real drawback is the absence of a search function for viewers but it’s okay, everything will be so clearly marked and organized that it will only be a problem when we are overloaded with files.
Let me know your thoughts. I’ll be moving ahead with one of those options at the end of the week.
storage size is limitless, just depends on what we get
Access: centralized, only one point of access
Search: by computer keyword search function
Privacy and Confidentiality: can apply password protection to individual documents
Option B: Google Drive
cloud storage: accessible, backed-up
15 GB free storage
cross compatibility, most files are being sent from other people’s google drive
easy implementation since we already have google account
collaborative documents
logs revision history
Access: accessible to general members via link
Search: search retrieval recognizes title, text and image content; Search function only available when you’re accessing the drive as owner (logging into VHS Archives’ google account) versus viewer
Privacy and Confidentiality: no password protection for individual files/folders but can limit sharing to private thereby access is only available to individuals via access to the google account
Option C: Dropbox
cloud storage: accessible, backed-up
2 GB free storage
files update automatically if working on from a shared folder
Access: accessible to general members via link
Search: No search function unless you save the folder into your dropbox account and then you can search by title and content via your computer search OR by browser based search on dropbox’s website; alternatively search and access by logging into VHS’ dropbox account
Privacy and Confidentiality: can apply password protection to individual documents
Personally from a privacy and security point of view. If the waivers are
going to be stored in the cloud I give it a thumbs down. I personally don’t
want anything with my signature stored in the cloud, that’s just one step
away from point of view of identity theft.
We’ll stick to working with organizing and storing non-personal information documents then.
Other docs (like waivers) can be a discussion for another time.