David_Gerard comments on Research methods - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Swimmer963 22 February 2011 06:10AM

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Comment author: Swimmer963 22 February 2011 04:08:46PM 1 point [-]

My workplace does things in a similar way, scanning in documents by hand without 'interpreting' them in any way. (The result is helpful; you can go on your computer and look at a patient's chart without having to physically go to their hospital campus; but it's also unhelpful in that you can't run a keyword search on anything in the charts, because they're saved as images as opposed to more search-friendly formats.) It looks messy and inefficient to ME that they're keeping both paper and digital records, but I'm sure the immediate cost of making a full transition would be enormous.

Still, I can't imagine that offices in fifty years will still be using this half-and-half method. As technology advances, maybe the transition will get easier; parts of the transition process itself could be automated, with software automatically converting scanned images into searchable text files. Either way, I think the transition has to be made eventually. (But that's a personal opinion.)

Comment author: David_Gerard 22 February 2011 09:06:14PM 0 points [-]

It looks messy and inefficient to ME that they're keeping both paper and digital records,

See my Australian Electoral Commission example. I can assure you that even a basic image scan is far easier to deal with than all the physical paper all the time. Particularly in 2011 rather than 1993.