Document preparation, indexing and optical character recognition... the biggest hurdle between you and instant information at your fingertips.

You may have been considering having your documents scanned for quite sometime now, but you know they are in a mess and you would probably need to designate at least a day to figure out what exactly has to happen to your documents before you can have them scanned.

You may even be scared of wasting money having useless images scanned, and that you would first like to get someone to remove those images before handing them over to a scanning service provider.

The other issue that may be bothering you is that it would not really be worth your while to have your images scanned, but not indexed. I mean, what's the difference between having to flip through hundreds of pages in hardcopy as compared to flipping through hundreds of pages in electronic documents in order to find the information you're looking for.

Probably the biggest issue for many is the perceived cost of having these documents indexed, as well as the sheer complexity of the job.

Perhaps you may be thinking that someone would need to have inside information into the kinds of documents you need indexed in order to properly understand how to go about.

Another of your concerns may be the fact that you would have to compromise the sensitivity of the information contained in your business documents by allowing a service bureau full access for the duration of the imaging project.

Let me try and answer some of these concerns.

Document indexing is expensive, but current OCR technology and Google type search engines solves that problem.

To start with let's look at your concern about the cost of having your documents indexed, and you are right, it is expensive and probably not cost-effective, but only if you look at indexing in terms of old-style document classification and filing.

The perspective of thinking in terms of classifying and filing all your documents according to an extensive classification system has changed considerably since the advent of the Internet and more specifically the Google type search engines which have turned the Internet into a useful library.

Can you imagine the task of having to index all the documents and information on the Internet? Forget about it.

To start off with, indexing is based on our own subjective filters about the content of information, and before the advent of text search engines, I guess it would have been necessary to supply particular collections of information with metadata in order to access them more efficiently.

Text searchable electronic information has changed all that and for the better I may add. The fact is we think and access information based on the way we think, and not the way documents necessarily have been indexed.

With Google search type technology we simply have to search for those words that appear in our heads when we think of information we may require, we then provide the search terms and hit the enter key.

In a flash we are presented with all the documents that comply with our search term, as well as the surrounding context of the information in each document. The computer has thus given us a representation of all the available information and provides us with relevance and other Meta data which may assist us in locating the desired document much more efficiently than had it been indexed manually.

Basic limited database type indexing to classify your documents is still required

This does not mean that we have to abandon database type indexing altogether, and I believe it is mandatory at least two identify and tag collections of documents according to its unique contextual properties of its own environment. To consider indexing most business type documents more extensively than this would be a waste of time and resources, and by its nature, unaffordable to most organisations.

When you think of having your documents scanned and indexed, I suggest you think in terms of getting them to be Google searchable. This is firstly the least expensive option, but by fire the most practical as well.

You may well ask how reliably the current optical character recognition software is capable of converting image based text to computer readable and searchable text, and the answer is that it will blow you away...at least 99% over fair quality documents.

The latest optical character recognition (OCR) software is just incredible. From the tiniest fonts such as to be found in the Yellow Pages and even including inverted text embedded into shaded areas of mono, greyscale or colour images are currently converted to more than 98% accuracy.

Obviously, handwritten notes cannot be relied upon to become searchable and will still need a couple of years before computers can practically convert all the different combinations, but we haven't found this to be a problem except for collections that contain predominantly handwritten notes.

Even though this is the case for many organisations, we haven't really found this to be a problem in terms of reducing the reliability of knowledge management in terms of having your documents OCR at to text searchable format, as most handwritten notes are contained in small readily identifiable collections of textbased information that does offers reliable text searchability.

Is it more economical to have someone to sort through your documents and discard the useless ones than simply scanning them all?

Now to answer your question as to whether it is more economical to employ someone to sort through your existing collections of documents and discard the useless ones, as compared to just scanning everything you have and paying the extra cost for having the useless ones scanned as well.

We have a lot of of our clients, especially doctors who are concerned with this. Their patient records contain many pathology reports and useless correspondence that already exist in some other format and they are concerned that it will cost them an arm and a leg to have all these documents scanned.

With the high-speed scanners currently available, this concern can be answered as follows. It is far more dear to employ someone to sort through documents at minimum wage rates than just to scan the whole lot at rates of up to 150 images per minute.

The other concern with having someone sort through your documents and discard the useless ones is the recognition that the person employed to do this job does not fully understand your criteria and for the sake of laziness or ignorance becomes less diligent after the first couple of hours, and starts trashing information that may be important.

Destroying the integrity of your document conversion project is the worst thing you can do, and will leave you in the dark as regards legality and more importantly litigation.

Of course this does not mean that we won't professionally address any of your particular document indexing and preparation requirements.

We are more than willing to provide you with free consulting to set your mind at ease as to the final practical functionality of your digital documents, and should you require the fulfilment of any special indexing and document preparation for your particular environment we would be happy to oblige, and furthermore we will do so at the best rates in the industry.

Please don't hesitate to call me on 1800 357 581 if you would like to discuss any of your particular document indexing and preparation requirements, or if you would like to get a sample of the final product in regards to the practical searchability of your particular type of documents using today's optical character recognition technology.

Otherwise, just fill out this form and I'll be in touch according to your preferences.

Your Name:
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Hilton Holder

2 valuable new document conversion services we now provide.

Same day Conversion of faxed documents to MS Word format at only $1.00 per page.

That's right, if you have ever needed to have a contract or any other document retyped at a moments notice our new express OCR our service would have saved the day.

Traditional OCR technology has always been limited in so far as providing accurate conversions from low resolution textbased images such as faxes. This has changed, as we have managed to train our software to accurately recognise and convert these low resolution characters and ligatures (word pairs) completely reliably.

The next time you need a document retyped, just click here and print the PDF form. Fill it out and fax it to us together with the document you would like to get back via e-mail as a fully editable Microsoft Word document.

After an hour or so we will send you a complete sample of your converted document in Acrobat PDF file format, together with an invoice. Just have a read of this document and should the quality meet the requirements you can confirm your acceptance via return e-mail, and moments later will receive your Word document as a virus free e-mail attachment.

Our current rates are $1.00 per page for an overnight service, $2.00 per page for our 4 hour turnaround service and $4.00 per page for our unique 1 hour service.

We have set up a hundred percent secure and convenient Paypal electronic payment service which allows you to pay with any credit card. You can also pay via EFT transfer and e-mail us your electronic receipt for immediate delivery of your Microsoft Word document.

We hope this new service makes as much sense to you as we thought it would, and if you have any suggestions as to how we could improve the service, please just popped us an e-mail and we will do our best to come up with the goods.

Now we can convert digital images from your mobile phone or digital camera to Microsoft Word file format.

Yet, we know it's not what you expect, but our new service also allows us to convert images of documents taken with your digital camera or a mobile phone into fully editable Microsoft Word file format.

The process is the same as for the above except that you have to e-mail the images to us in JPEG digital image format.

Try and use your image editing software to compress these digital images to less than 3 MB in a go, as large files may block your e-mail mailbox.

If you cannot find any suitable software for compressing your images, I suggest you download a free copy of Irfanview from www.irfanview.com.

Also keep in mind that we need digital images with sufficient clarity for us to work with, which means that the images have to be taken at 1.3 megapixel resolution and with sufficient lighting.

Thus, when next you are in the library and you would like to copy a couple of pages from a reference book I suggest you simply take a couple of good images with your mobile phone and e-mail the images through to us at photos@docsondisc.com.

One hour later you will be able to use this text in your computer's word processing software.

Our incredibly low rates are the same as for the conversion of scanned documents, one dollar per page for our overnight service, and two dollars per page if you need it the same day.