Best Practices for Scanning
Information that organizations need comes from many
sources. Increasingly, that information arrives in
electronic format, making it easy to include it in our repositories.
Some information, however, still arrives in
hard copy and should be scanned for ready accessibility
by the appropriate people in your organization.
While the process of converting these
paper documents to electronic images can
be time consuming, it can be made easier
by following best practices. Following are
standards that will help you do just that:
- ISO 10196, Document Imaging Applications
– Recommendations for the Creation
of Original Documents
- AIIM MS52 , Recommended Practice for
the Requirements and Characteristics of
Original Documents Intended for Optical
Scanning
- AIIM TR15, Planning Considerations,
Addressing Preparation of Documents for
Image Capture
These three standards provide guidance
on converting hard-copy, paper documents
to electronic images by identifying issues
you may encounter when preparing them
for capture. They will also help you understand
the physical characteristics of paper
documents that can make scanning difficult.
If your organization is initiating a scanning
operation, these documents will also help in
the process design.
It’s not enough to simply have the right
scanning processes in place, however; the
legibility of the images captured is extremely
important, especially when you intend to
discard the original paper. The following
standards will help you ensure that the quality
of the images is the best it can possibly be
by providing test targets to be used with your
scanner as well as procedures for sampling
the documents that have been scanned.
- ISO 12653-1 , Electronic imaging – Test Target
for the Black-and-White Scanning of Office
Documents – Part 1: Characteristics
- ISO 12653-2 , Electronic imaging – Test
Target for the Black-and-White scanning of
Office Documents – Part 2: Method of Use
- AIIM TR34 , Sampling Procedures for
Inspection by Attributes of Images in
Electronic Image Management (EIM)
and Micrographics Systems
When used correctly, test targets will help you ensure
that your scanner operates at peak performance. If you’re conducting a large
operation, it’s not feasible to inspect the image quality of each and every
scanned document. The use of sampling, whereby you inspect the quality of a
representative sample of the scanned images, as well as the indexed information,
is an acceptable means of ensuring that the quality of the documents captured
meets your organization’s requirements.
| For more information about AIIM standards, or if you would like to participate in the
development of standards, please contact Betsy Fanning, AIIM director of Standards and Member Services, or visit www.aiim.org/standards. And mark your calendars now for March 31-April 2, 2009, which
is Standards Week 2009. |
