The paperless professor
Jones School’s Price says goodbye to hard copies

BY JULIA NGUYEN
Special to the Rice News

Richard Price has taken to ridding his house of paper. The assistant professor of accounting at the Jones Graduate School of Business has no more file cabinets and drawers stuffed with documents and bill statements. No children’s artwork papering his refrigerator. No birthday cards piled on countertops. Everything that can fit in his scanner is digitized, tagged and stored in a self-made database that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, he’s preserving an ever-changing family history — and without the usual clutter that goes with it. Whether for personal or business reasons, Price says it’s the way of the future.

	RICHARD PRICE

How did you get started on this project?

About a year and a half ago, I wanted to get rid of clutter in my house. So, I bought a scanner and started converting everything we wanted to keep into digital files. I created a simple database that made it easy to search for those documents. The idea is turning massive amounts of information usable by making it accessible. I now have scanned more than 1,400 documents. That’s about four gigabytes. I also have, easily, a terabyte worth of photos, music and videos.

Your children’s drawings have also been digitized. What else?

Yes, all PDFs. Report cards, too. Initially, my wife worried about throwing stuff away, but not anymore. We have recipes from years ago, invitations, letters and Christmas and birthday cards. Tax papers, medical records and utility bills.

I went back to California to visit last summer. Since I had scanned my former church’s old photo directory, I was able to greet everyone by name.

What was the inspiration for the undertaking?

Well, I generally try to use as little paper as possible. I’m conscious of recycling, and I care about the environment, but I really don’t like clutter. I suppose the real motivation was my desire to preserve my family’s history. I have five kids from ages 11 to 1, so you can imagine how many drawings they bring home in any given week. The drawings tell stories about who they are and about our family. Not only are they being stored, but I can share their artwork and writing immediately with the grandparents, for instance.

Has this idea spilled over into work, perhaps your research?

Certainly. My work involves collecting and sharing lots of data. One of my current research projects focuses on junk emails that urge investors to buy stocks. Did investors react to it? They did, so we built a database to collect data related to the project. I’m also working on cataloging information for a colleague who has a one-of-a-kind collection —decades-old confidential correspondence from high-level individuals related to controversial accounting issues. Both databases are sharable, accessible and allow multiple users simultaneously. I can see changes as they happen. It’s extremely useful, because in academia, success is based on the ability to get new ideas and new sources of data to test these ideas.

Will we become a paperless society?

I believe eventually. It seems we’re already moving away from paper. It just makes so much sense. From a business perspective, we can completely eliminate distribution and waste. Google offers online books, and libraries are also making available manuscripts and the like. We just have to re-educate people. We’ll save money, trees and time — and add some space in the house.

This article appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of the Jones Journal.