Document scanners, and what comes after
Digitising an archive starts at a scanner and does not end there. Scanning is the easy half; the question that makes or breaks the project is what the files will be called and where they land.
Four kinds of scanner
The number of pages per day decides which, not the budget.
- Desktop scannersFor a reception desk or a desk where a stack goes through daily. Compact, and fast enough for tens of pages at a time.
- Feeder scannersFor hundreds of pages a day, with a feeder that copes with mixed sizes and detects double feeds. This is the category for an administration clearing the paper.
- Production scannersFor an archive that has to leave in weeks. Thousands of pages an hour, with the maintenance that goes with it.
- Portable scannersFor away from the office: an engineer scanning a work order, an adviser taking something away from a customer.
Three steps that set the order
The first is the step most often skipped and the dearest to redo.
First decide how it will be found again
Which data comes out of the document, what the file will be called, which folder it lands in. Without that answer, scanning produces a folder with ten thousand nameless PDFs, and that is not an archive.
Then choose the scanner
The number of pages per day and the state of the paper decide the machine. Old, creased or stapled paper needs a different feeder from a fresh stack.
Then set up the text recognition
Recognition makes a scanned image searchable. Test with the worst documents there are and not with the nicest, because that is what is in the boxes.
What belongs with this
Digitising touches storage, management and retention periods.
An archive you can find things in
Tell us how much paper there is and what has to happen to it. You get a proposal that starts from the filing and not from the machine.
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