title: solution to OCR / search through 4 million pieces of paper and 10,000 added daily
body: <p>I work for a medical lab company. They need to be able to search through all their client data. So far they have a few years in storage about 4 million pieces of paper, and they are adding 10,000 pages per day. For data that is 6 months old, they need to access it about 10-20 times per day. They are deciding whether to spend 80k on a scanning system, and have the secretaries scan everything in house, or whether to hire a company like iron mountain to do this. Iron mountain will charge around 8cents per page, which adds up to around $300k for the amount of paper we have, plus a bunch of more money every day for the 10,000 sheets.</p>
  
  <p>I am thinking that perhaps I can build a database and do all the scanning in house. </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What are those systems that are used to scan checks and mail and they read really messy hand writing really well?</li>
  <li>has anyone had experience building a database with a bunch of OCR'd searchable documents? What tools should I use for my problem?</li>
  <li>Can you recommend the best OCR libraries?</li>
  <li>As a programmer, what would you do to solve this problem?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>FYI none of the answers below answer my questions well enough</p>