Scanning

The SDS Group is one of the country's leading scanning bureaus. At our offices we can deal with a complete range of paper documents to be electronically archived. We can store up to approximately 30,000 sheets of A4 paper per CD-ROM and up to 3,000 large format A0 drawings.

Document types we can process include:

• Normal A4 paper
  We have the capacity to scan and electronically convert between 12,000 and 40,000 A4 sheets of paper per day.
• Black and white
  Documents from the size of a business card through to A0 in size including engineering diagrams, maps, architectural plans etc.
• Colour
  We are one of the few organisations in the country who own an A0 colour scanner. This means that colour documents from the size of a business card through to A0 (47 by 33 inches) in size can be scanned in and digitally stored.
• Colour photographs (up to 3000 per day)
  We can deal with hundreds of colour photographs ranging from the size of a postage stamp through to anything as large as 1 metre in width by 20 metres in length

We also have the facility to convert existing microfiche and microfilm archives to electronic files and incorporate them into the resultant document management solution (DMS). This includes conversion of microfiche, aperture cards & 16mm or 35 mm roll film.

Scanning Process

We scan all paper-based documentation at mainly 300dpi (depending on quality of original). There will be full OCRing (Optical Character Recognition) of every word of every page of very document, enabling full text search and interrogation.

We tend to scan to Adobe Acrobat PDF Files and create two-tiered PDF files: the top level being the 100% facsimile image; the bottom level being the OCR'd text. The end result will be a multi-page PDF file for each file/record. For each PDF File created, we will also provide an associated .txt or .rtf file with the OCR'd text (in order that it can be imported into the on-line retrieval solution for fast searching capabilities).

Storing, Indexing and Searching

We understand that it is all very well having 20,000 sheets of A4 paper or 3000 A0 drawings on one CD-ROM, but you do need to be able to retrieve them, quickly and efficiently.

Thus, our software indexing solutions can mirror your current manual filing system 100%. Take the example of an electronic filing cabinet. A filing cabinet contains drawers, which in turn contain folders, which in turn contain binders, which in turn contains documents. Any of these sections can be searched upon by the index fields you specify for each document within any level or by moving down the hierarchical tree until you get to the section you require.