There are two ways to convert your physical records into digital format.
- You can scan your invoices, checks, letters and other documents into a pure "image" format that is simply a picture of the page converted to an image.
- This is the most efficient and cost effective way to convert to a paperless office.
- Each image is indexed by entering information into text fields then a path is created from the indexes to the image - in order to locate the image. To understand this statement, find a picture stored on your computer, using Windows Explorer. Place your cursor on the image and "right mouse" click it and a context menu will drop down… click on "Properties" from the list of choices. A "Properties" window opens. Explore each of the tabs across the top. One of them will expose a properties page for the image that contains such info (probably empty, on your disk) as Title, Subject, Author, Category, Keywords and Comments. Scanning to an image (document imaging) produces a file like this - and it is then populated by special software or manually by your personnel or ours - depending upon the terms of the agreement. When you scan to an image, all the physical characteristics of the original paper record are saved as part of the image (color, text formatting, blemishes, physical signatures - etc.).
- The other way to convert physical records to digital format is known as OCR… Optical Character Recognition.
- Using this technology, a scanner actually "reads" the contents of a record - and then reproduces it on a digital page in text format. The advantage of the OCR process is that the indexing process is faster and probably more inclusive overall. Also, documents scanned as text make much smaller files on disk and therefore, more can be stored in a given space.
- The disadvantage of OCR is that a certain level of inaccuracy exists. What this means is that some of the scanned characters are not translated properly. Thus the word "password" - might be translated as "passw0rk" or something similar. For most types of records - this is simply not acceptable. Particularly records that represent precise measurements, conditions or statements. As a result, most document scanning translates pages into digital format that is an exact reproduction of the original document.
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