Sarah,
We are pretty big on scanning here--(2 90-page-per-minute machines, and 3 people working full time running them), so my experience is more on the "industrial" end of the spectrum, but hopefully I can give you some advice that may help, and tell you about some of the features that are available to help you scan and retrieve images.
First of all, what you are talking about is referred to as indexing and retrieval.
The indexing part is the storing of different pieces of information from (or about) the documents, which can be used later in order to retreive the images from wherever you choose to store them. This indexing information may be stored in something relatively simple like an Access database, an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document, or a text file, or it may be stored in a more sophisticated document storage/retrieval system like Filenet.
Wherever you store the indexing information, you first need to create/input it. This can be done manually by scanning a document, then looking at the image and keying information you see there, by extracting it from an existing system, or it can be automated by using OCR (optical character recognition) to look for certain pieces of data in certain places on each scanned document. If you choose the automated process, the software that's available today is capable of reading either text or bar code(or on a limited basis, handwritten), information from selected areas of a document(called zoned OCR), and using that information to create index(es) that can be used for looking up the document later.
Let's say that the first documents you want to automate are parts orders. When you look on the parts order form, there is a form number in the upper right corner of the form, and in the lower left, there is a customer number. You can tell the software to optically recognize these two fields (within limits), and use them as indexes to the document they are read from. So your software can then store the image (which might have a name like XYZ123.tif) in the C:\Images folder (or wherever you told it to store this particular type of image). At the same time, it will add a row to an Access database table that contains the Form Number, the Customer Number, and a hyperlink to the image file.
The two brands of automated scanning/indexing software we have used with the most success are Kofax Ascent Capure, and Digitech Paperflow. Both are probably capable of doing anything you want, plus a bunch of other stuff you're not interested in right now. My recommendation would be for the Paperflow product because it's both a lot cheaper, and more user friendly.
We started automated imaging in 1999, and at the time, we didn't know *anything* about it (just that we were buried in paper and we hated microfilm). Now we have an image control system where any one of dozens of people can look up documents based upon any combination of 16 indexes and view them at their desktops at any time. It has saved us tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention increasing our level of customer service exponentially. (They love it when you can look at the forms as they are asking you questions about them, and we frequently email images while we are on the phone with people, so both can view it at the same time.)
If I can answer any questions about this stuff, feel free to ask.
Hope I haven't flooded you with too much info, but I remember what it was like when we started, and how much it meant when someone gave us a hand understanding the imaging process.
Tranman
and set its datatype to "text", so it can hold the product name or product code.