Making stacks of information available online

[laserblazer]

One of our ex-teachers called me yesterday asking for some advice. She runs the local historical society and they have newsletters going back to the early 1980s. She wants to make the information available online and searchable. A fair chunk is hard copy only, so will need to be digitised. Hopefully, OCR will do the lion's share of this. But what would be the easiest format to use. My immediate thought was to create a big pdf but are there other ways that a relative novice could do it? Possibly as a wiki?

[TechMonkey]

We converted all our policy files into a wiki as SLT wanted everything to be referenced and tracked. It was a lot of work to get setup and get the info but had real benefits. Not so sure for Newsletters though. If they wanted to extend the system into a whole reference for their historical society then I would say Wiki was a great idea. Otherwise proper OCR'd PDFs or a WordPress/Joomla/other CMS solution.

[SteveBentley]

OCR PDFs would be my tool of choice here too. Acrobat Pro does a decent job of keeping the original format while making it searchable.

 

This is one of the few occasions when I'd recommend leaving the content as PDFs rather than trying to convert it to HTML to put in a wiki directly, to maintain the historical value.