Documentary
| Wednesday 3rd February 2010 16:59MST | → |
Some people have asked me about my electronic document management system (though I often suspect it’s a reaction to me going on about it so much). However, the philosophy behind is worth discussing as I consider it to be an example of the principles: the perfect is the enemy of the good or worse is better.
That comes about from previous attempts to create such a system. Essentially, the idea is to scan in all my paperwork, including legacy stuff going back years, so I can access it quickly, easily and efficiently on my computer - and consequently get rid of all the paper (as I only have a small apartment). The ideal solution would have been:
- being able to access documents online
- searching through them, preferably using tags
- linking related documents
- a shiny custom made application for viewing, with resizing and converting to other formats
However, I found it was turning in to more trouble than it was worth trying to satisfy even one of these requirements. I never seemed to be able to get a lot of the functionality working to my satisfaction or come up with a decent subset of tags that was small enough to be useful but large enough to cover all situations. Consequently, given other priorities, I abandoned and restarted the project several times.
Eventually I tried tackling it with more pragmatism: just start scanning in images a page at a time, in greyscale (so I don’t lose detail) and at a decent resolution (150dpi) and in .PNG format with the scanned timestamp (to the second) as the unique filename - after which I’ll worry about how to file them. I wrote a simple shell script to handle this.
After scanning a thousand or so (oh yes, this is going back a good decade), I temporarily filed those I’d done in directories with a deep structure so there wouldn’t be too many images in any one folder. A typical example was:
/document_management/utilities_services/electricity/npower/bills/2009/
When I’d finally completed all the legacy documentation and filed it away, I realised “Isn’t this good enough as a system?” The highly detailed directory structure was good enough for me to quickly locate documents and the scenarios I’d previously conjured up, such as “Find all insurance documents for 2006″, never arose - in other words, that type of search was never needed. Finding documents from a purely functional point of view (i.e. for one company or for one house) was the approach I was likely to use 95% of the time.
Now I simply access the documents with the built in image viewer, all of which have a built-in ‘display next image in the directory’ feature that helps stepping through multi-page documents.
It’s far from perfect - but the perfect never got built and there were no signs it ever would.
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on February 7th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Now everything depends on how well you designed your directory structure. What was your design and how successful has it been? A long search turned up no reference material about personal filing and my latest top level is roughly {work / family / friends / posessions / wishlist / interests / other}. I live a small life
on February 7th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
I’ve arranged the directory structure very functionally. For example, my top-level layout is:
car
education
financial
government
health
insurance
invoices
lettings
manuals
memberships
miscellaneous
personal
politics
utilities_services
work
This may or may not work for other people and does have a certain redundancy/complexity, as I actually put car insurance under ‘car’ rather than ‘insurance’ (which just covers contents and travel at the moment) but it’s in keeping with the principle I outlined - it’s not perfect but it works well enough
on October 21st, 2011 at 4:01 am
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. A “documentary film” was originally a movie shot on film stock—the only medium available—but now includes video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television program. “Documentary” has been described as a “filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception” that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries.