Microfilm Scanning And Digital Conversion

Microfilm to digital image conversion and indexing has come a long way over the years. You can make searchable pdf files (OCR and ICR) from your documents so you can search for specific information. This is just one example of what information technology has done to improve document management and document imaging.

There are other ways that you can index your documents to make the images more useful. These include a process of data entry, indexing of vital information, and blip capturing from film. This may not sound familiar to some, but these processes are quite common and straightforward for an experienced company. Here is some explanation of what I mean:

Data entry is basically the process of entering information from your documents into a database. The type of information that is captured in this process is later used to find the documents that you need. The database used in this process stores the name and location of an image, and links the information to the images so that when you search for a name or address, for example, the document is displayed.

Indexing is also a term used to describe the data entry process. Some people relate this term to the process of organizing information by some searchable format. In general it is the same as data entry. Most images may have been stored on 16mm roll film, 35mm roll film, microfiche cards, or some other format that required a digital conversion.

Blip capturing is somewhat different. If your microfilm has little tick marks or tiny marks under the frames, these may be the blips, and it may contain important information about the documents. With the right equipment, and experienced operator can extract this information during the conversion process. The information capture here may serve to group the documents so that the data entry may me simplified or eliminated all together. This will reduce and in some cases, it may eliminate the cost of indexing to you.

In general, capturing and identifying your documents in a microfilm conversion project can be simple and cost effective. There are many advantages to converting your microfilm and it can be done quickly and is not expensive. You should contact an experienced and well-established company like Scanning Depot for additional information on your microfilm scanning project.

Convert film to images and indexing

The value of microfilm scanning or converting microfiche to create digital images is greatly increased when it is properly indexed. Index information can be manually keyed via data entry, run through an OCR process to create text search able PDFs, barcode extracted, or blip extracted.

For film that contains "blips" or image markers (small counters created when the film was made), we can extract the information those blips represent. For example, a roll of 16mm film or a 35mm roll of microfilm may contain student records with a large blip indicating the start of a new student's folder, and a small or medium blip indicating the pages within that folder. The output file name format for blip-extracted images can be arranged in any way you like - in a multi-tiff, in sub-directories, or by data key indexing each master blip.

Kodak Oracle Bar-code extraction is another of our capabilities. Similar to blip-extraction, we can retrieve data from Oracle bar-coded frames. When the bar-codes are consistent and clear, we can use this data for indexing purposes and/or provide the information as the image file name. Scanning Depot has indexing software that can accommodate documents that have a book and page numbering system, or fields such as SSN indexing, Name and Date, or other data fields. Coupled with our quality control and validation, would assure that the digital images are named correctly for any microfilm conversion.