AIIM Best Practice - Preparing Documents for Scanning
ERM Community Wiki
Even though the majority of documents handled in a business are born digital, organizations still have a lot of paper that should be converted to digital format. To ensure all documents are captured, are legible and high quality, there are several steps that should be followed to prepare the documents.
The following is a start of a list of steps that should be taken to ensure that all documents are captured.
Share your tips, comment on these, or modify them. Let’s make this practice into a ‘best’ practice together!
- Receive documents or files and log them.
- Unbind documents. Save the binding materials if it is necessary for assembly later.
- Carefully unfold and smooth out paper documents.
- Remove staples, paper clips, and other fastners.
- Tape torn documents, using non-yellowing matt-finish tape.
- Identify illegible documents or those that meet preparation criteria of illegible documents and remove them for separate processing.
- Identify documents to be enhanced by using special scanning techniques.
- Align all page to the same orientation so that the top of every page faces the same was and the front of every page faces the same way.
- Sort documents into batches (i.e., size, color, date, document type, etc.)
- Determine if the cost to perform digitization in house is equal to or less than the cost to outsource the work to a document imaging company.
- After scanning, log the documents that were scanned
Source: ANSI/AIIM TR17, Planning Considerations Addressing Preparation of Documents for Image Capture
