Imaging Services Blog

Methods and Procedures Entries

September 12th September 12th   Comments

How to control costs for your next document scanning project

Whether you’re looking for ways to reduce costs on your next outsourced document scanning project, or control costs on your ongoing in-house document scanning processes, you need to take a broad look at what “cost” really means.

Broadly speaking, every document scanning project includes three stages:

  1. Preparation: select documents to be scanned, remove staples and paper clips, sort the documents and arrange the papers into batches. This is labor-intensive work. According to estimates from Document Management magazine, the preparation stage accounts for 37% of the costs of a typical document scanning project.
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July 13th July 13th   Comments

How efficient is your document scanning operation?

Whether your company uses in-house staff, temporary workers, or outsourced scanning services, efficiency in document scanning is becoming more important than ever before. Companies are looking for new efficiencies in document scanning to save money, improve workflows, capture business-critical information, and simplify their daily operations by reducing the amount of paper involved in their work processes.

Here are a few key components to consider when evaluating the efficiency of your document scanning operation:

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March 21st March 21st   Comments

When NOT to use barcodes for your document conversion project

Another part of preparing for a document conversion project is for the client to have a sense of whether or not they need to include barcodes as part of the scanning process. Many clients think that barcodes are a “must have” to ensure an efficient document conversion. But the reality is that you don’t always need barcodes.

It’s true that barcodes can be used when scanning documents in order to create an accurate index to find the scanned images’ accompanying data. At microMEDIA, we almost always use barcodes as part of our scanning process for clients. However, while barcodes can be useful, they are not an absolute requirement.

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February 28th February 28th   Comments

Client responsibilities in working with an outsourced scanning service

When hiring an outsourced document scanning service like microMEDIA, it helps to have a good understanding of the typical roles and responsibilities. There are certain tasks that the scanning service provides, but the client ultimately has to be actively involved in the scanning process and responsible for oversight of the final result. With clear communication and open collaboration along the way, we can make your document conversion project a success.

Questions to ask before starting a document conversion project

Every document conversion project is its own unique creation. There are so many variables that go into determining the right approach and process.

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December 22nd December 22nd   Comments

Aperture card scanning process – final delivery

As part of every aperture card conversion project, microMEDIA Imaging Systems delivers digital files of all scanned microfilm images from the aperture cards, as well as an accompanying database of metadata from the cards which is used to identify the images.

These two components are linked together so that clients can search through the database to find the appropriate image based on the dates, project names, and other data categories, and also quickly search and review the scanned digital images from the microfilms.

Searchable Database: As part of every aperture card conversion, we create a comma delimited spreadsheet containing the relevant data categories for each scanned microfilm image.

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December 8th December 8th   Comments

Aperture card scanning process – quality control

Due to the complexity of aperture card scanning, one of the other crucial elements of any aperture card conversion project is quality control. Whenever microMEDIA Imaging Systems works on a project to convert aperture cards to digital format, we make sure to devote a good amount of time to quality control – there are various idiosyncrasies in dealing with aperture cards that we need to watch for, and it’s always better to fix problems and make any corrections while the images are still easily accessible.

Here are some of the issues we watch for during the quality control process:

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November 24th November 24th   Comments

Aperture card scanning process – identifying metadata

One of the most critical stages of the aperture card scanning process is identifying the metadata – the descriptive information that explains what the microfilm image contains – on each aperture card. This is why aperture card scanning involves much more than just “scanning;” some of the most complex work involves sorting through the old cards to find out exactly what we’re looking at, deciding what is important, and saving the information that needs to be stored for the future.

What is aperture card metadata?

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November 10th November 10th   Comments

What to expect from the aperture card scanning process

When clients hire microMEDIA Imaging Systems for an aperture card conversion project, they often have a lot of questions. Especially if the company’s aperture cards have not been in regular use and may no longer be in the best condition.  A client might need some explanation of what will be involved with converting these unique documents to digital format.

In general, microMEDIA Imaging Systems uses the following multi-stage process to perform aperture card scanning, but the work involves more than just scanning. Scanning aperture cards and delivering a final digital file requires our team to wear many hats – depending on the age and complexity of the information stored on the cards, we need to serve as detectives, data analysts and research librarians.

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