What Is Imaging

It is true that the majority of documents created nowadays are created and stored electronically. Nearly every organization however, has a large volume of documents that currently only exist in a paper format. Document Imaging or imaging, allows organizations to capture paper based information and convert it to electronic images that are stored in a computer electronically. There are several reasons why organizations decide to transform these paper documents and make them available electronically:

• Accessibility
• Ease of access
• Enables full text search
• Security
• Space savings

Imaging however, can be a costly process and because of that it deserves attention and analysis. Even though imaging is getting easier to manage with all of the various type of scanning hardware available, the big steps in an imaging project are:

• Sorting the documents,
• Preparing them for scanning,
• Scanning,
• Indexing the scanned documents so they can be retrieved and searched,
• Storing in a system.

It is easy to understand and quite obvious that sorting in the situation shown in this picture will require a lot of time and effort, but even in well organized environments it takes a lot of time and effort to sort and prepare the documents. What is perceived as a simple task that needs to take place during document preparation, removing all of the staples and paperclips for example, can be a mammoth task when considering the volume of paper to be addressed.

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Another important and time consuming element is the indexing of the document. Do this step wrong and you find that a lot of money is being spent making documents irretrievable. The quality and effort put into these activities determines how well the document can be found in the electronic environment. The questions of what file format will be used to store the file, what quality of scan is needed, what needs to be scanned in addition to many other questions also have to be answered.

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All of these elements and many more determine the success of an imaging project which is often linked to an effort of gaining better control of all information in an organization.

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AIIM provides an educational roadmap for the industry.

• Certificate Training Programs  - Industry leading Certificate Training Programs include Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Electronic Records Management (ERM), Business Process Management (BPM), Information Organization & Access (IOA/Search), Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0), Email Management (EMM) and SharePoint. Courses are available via the web or classroom.
• AIIM Essentials Courses   - The AIIM Essentials programs are short online courses that are focused on very specific topics applicable to any organization, and are a perfect complement to the AIIM Certificate offerings. Courses include: Imaging and Recognition, Evaluating SharePoint, Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, eDiscovery, and PDF/A.
• In-person Seminars  - These free, educational seminars held in cities throughout the U.S. and Canada, help educate business and government professionals with information on the latest industry trends, key business drivers, case study examples, solutions, and more.
• Information Portals  - Provide case studies and white papers, articles and research studies focused on Green ECM, Compliance/Electronic Records Management, SharePoint and ECM, Healthcare Information Management, and Capture/Scanning/Recognition.