Some Information Concerning Document Imaging

By Chris Ferrer

One of the ways businesses have looked at to save costs and boost efficiency is Document Imaging. This describes the information technology which uses copiers and scanners to electronically store and retrieve information when needed. Advances in the methods being used include programs used to copy and reproduce documents in the computer with no need to scan or copy. In the last couple decades, businesses have searched for ways to simplify their information storage and lower costs. The price of maintaining warehouses and staffs to store and then locate and pull the info when needed was deemed a liability since the information still required conversion before it could be used. The imaging business grew to meet the challenge. The switch to electronic storage was commenced as a way to not only cut out the need for warehouse storage, but to introduce improved efficiency through the easier manipulation of storing and retrieving electronically archived documents. Paper storage can be reduced and waste recycled for savings by initiating electronic storage, which is a content management system. Pixelated, or bitmapped files, such as JPEGs and TIFFs, were common standards used to save copied or scanned files in a digital format for storage. These files could be saved to CDs or DVDs and later accessed with an optical character recognition (OCR) or bitmap imaging program. This method still required the stored content to be converted to a usable form, and even then, the data was sometimes not usable or available for cross platform export. Scanned text needed OCR translation and images were not always in the proper format to be used. Though better than paper storage, this was still not user friendly. As time passed, the formats used by software developers and systems engineers slowly began to emerge for universal application in Document Imaging. Text formats like rich text format (RTF), or document (DOC), became default standards for most text programs, and the portable document format (PDF), was adopted by virtually all the industry to become a compatible storage and recovery format for images and text.

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