No design knowledge - Need advice

[GPeterson82]

Thanks for taking a look at my "thread", I'll do my best to explain what I want to accomplish -

We have somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand pieces of construction literature that we will be selling through our webpage.

We will be taking a picture of each of these pieces of literature (sounds fun huh?) and putting them on the page.

I am looking for a program/tool (not sure what the name would be) that would allow for someone to select one, two, three or more categories to narrow their search.

We would save the information with the associations. For instance, someone could select a manufacturer, type of machine and type of literature. Only those lit pieces that fell under that category would come up. (would also be interested in being able to do a keyword search of the descriptions we put with each piece)

If that isn't clear I'd be happy to post more. If you have any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it...I think I may have morning breath permanently caked on my neck from my bossing breathing on it...

[NogDog]

Sounds like you'll want to create a database to store all the information and then create programs that can connect to that database to create dynamic search forms and then execute the searches. If the idea of creating and populating a database and then creating programs to interract with that database sounds daunting or like a foreign language, then my suggestion would be to bite the bullet and hire someone to do it for you.

[Stephen Philbin]

If you're scanning images of the documents, does that mean that's what they're going to stay as? Images? You don't have some sort of software to scan the images and extract the text?

If all you can have is just the images of the documents, then that is going to really hurt your ability to accurately search through the data. I suppose the simple solution in that sort of situation would be to just save the files with semantic and descriptive file names and archive them in a directory structure that reflects the structuring of the documentation.

I'd really just go the database way though. Like Nog said, bite the bullet and hire a professional to build a proper databse system capable of storing all this info and have the developer give it a user friendly input and data searching interface. Then hire people to input all that data by hand, or get some software to read the text and put it into a text file or the database.

[Compguy Pete]

I would use Omni Page and dump the info into a database/CMS that will be your best bet.
http://www.Scansoft.com/OmniPage

CMS - Content Managment System.

I'd also agree with the other posters, this is not a job you can do on your own or cheaply. You can certainly save costs by doing the scanning yourself, however it would also go much faster if you can get a sheet feeder scanner. I know HP and the others make some very affordable All-in-One Printer/Scanners that have couple hundred page feeders that would work great for this project.

I had to do something like this for a client... that auto feeder made the 400 page scan job a real breeze over what I thought was going to happen by the old way of hand placing and scanning of each page.

I currently own version 11 of Omni page... I would imagine they have made a huge improvement since. My version is nearly perfect in reading the documents so I would think it's only gotten better.

But find someone local who can sit down and really help you though what you need and see first hand what your dealing with.

[GPeterson82]

Thank you guys for all of the input - it will be helpful in moving forward.

[Stephen Philbin]

Well you're welcome to come back if you have more questions at a later point. I can't guarantee anyone will be able to give you solutions, but we'll always do out best to see you headding in the right direction if we can. ;)