I suspect this is a simple one, but then I'm new to this. I'm interested in
the idea of transforming my paper archives into scanned archives.

Of course, I could just scan documents and thrown the PDFs into a directory.

But it occurred to me that it would be even nicer to have those scanned PDFs
somehow in a database, so that I could search for things, etc.

So I was thinking about the design of the records:

tblScannedDocs

TheDate
Description
TheScannedDocItself

What I'm wondering is, what's the best way to handle TheScannedDocItself? I
can imagine two possibilities:

- Put the scanned doc itself into the field. I suppose that's the famous
"blob" idea. I don't even know whether Access supports this. But that, of
course, would lead to a huge database (in terms of storage).

- Put a link to the scanned doc in that field. That would assume that the
docs, say, are in the same directory as the database file, but I wouldn't
have any problem with that. Since the scanned doc would be a scanned PDF, it
wouldn't be a "link" in the sense of a real link to an Excel file's
contents, but rather ... well, I suppose it would just be a link to the file
in the directory, right?

Any words of wisdome from experienced folks on handling this kind of issue?

Many thanks!

John