Rick & Hans, I'll chip in a few comments based on prior job
responsibilites. I oversaw an archival microfilming of lab notebooks
at a chemical R&D lab that was being closed & the employees of which
were being dispersed to multiple locations. Microfilm/microfiche is
not a user friendly medium, but it is archival. If one of your
objectives is to provide a permanent alternative to your original lab
notebooks to protect against loss, damage, etc., microfilming, if
conducted under suitable standards for permanence, will provide a
long-term, storage stable medium. Computerized lab notebook storage &
retrieveal will obviously enhance retrieval and be much more "user
friendly." But the very ease of alteration has caused considerable
delays in the legal admissibility of computerized lab notebook records.
Having been out of the records management side of things for a long
while, I'd suggest scouting a scanning service bureau that could scan
the lab notebook pages, OCR the contents, thus facilitating indexing &
retrieval, but also output the image scans onto archival standard
microforms. The state of the art for OCR of handwriting is not great,
but certainly would provide more retrieval points than a purely
microform based system. If economically feasible, I'd suggest keying
in the existing lab notebook indices, presuming you already require some
type of table of contents/index listing from your scientists/engineers.
You'd get better results that way than by OCR alone, where your error
rates would be considerable.
Roy Zimmermann
Patent Information Specialist
612-514-3304
roy.zimmermann@medtronic.com
rzimmerma@aol.com
>>> Hans Geelback Andersen <infoco@infoco.dk> 02/16/00 03:56AM >>>
A remark from a non-member, sorry
Dear Rick
I cannot advise anyone to start a new project based microfiche That
technology is a dying technology, it's difficult and very costly to buy
new readers and the possibilities to 'work with' informations
on a film are nearly non exsisting.
Look in the the yellow pages and find a company that professionally can
scan each side into a file - and make a database / index to the files
with relevant - and searchable - comments.
We have established such a system covering patent application, dev.
notes and lab reports and it works beatifull and - first of all - You
can put new ideas into this kind of system.
Yours
Hans Geelback Andersen
infoco System A/S, Denmark
Rick Samuelson wrote:
> We currently have several hundred lab notebooks that need to be
copied and put into secure storage. At present we are leaning toward
microfiche. Are there better alternatives from an IP standpoint?
>
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