Thanks for the reply Jim.  I've answered your questions below as well as added a couple more
of my own.  Any information you can give me would be appreciated.

>> Any of the current crop of database programs can handle the data
>> and the scanned images.  Since you used the term "users",
>> this implies a multi-user setup.  Which adds many other factors into the decision process.
>> Is this database to be shared across a network?  What kind of network?

No network, it will be a stand alone computer initially

>>How many users will be accessing the data, in total and at any given instant?

Only one user at a time.

>> Will the users have different levels of access capability?

Yes, they will logon and most users will only have read access.  There will be
one logon for the administrator to add or modify records.

>> Are there estimates to the size of the data file?

There are about 10500 "jobs" to be scanned (96-99) and approximately 250 added per month.
The plan is that we will eventually start moving data to DVD or some other storage medium
once they get x years old (x is yet to be determined but will probably be about 4 years.

Assuming that we use Access (open to change but that is what we have now)  can I compress and
decompress the scanned images on the fly?

What is the compression ratio for a scanned image?

If I build a system with a 333MHZ processor, 512MB memory and 80GB drive space will that
be sufficent for what I am trying to do?  (Will also have a DVD drive for backup)

Is there any advantage to using SCSI drives as opposed to EIDE?

Thanks for your help.
Tom Cassidy

> I need to create a database that will contain the following information:
> Job #
> Customer Name
> Job Date
> Scanned images of job tickets (could be as many as 10 scanned 8 1/2 x 11
> pages per job)
>
> The users need to be able to do a lookup based on customer name, a range
of
> job numbers or a range of dates and view the scanned images as
appropriate.
>
> The user currently has MS Access.  Is this a good choice for this type of
> database?
>

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