FAQ - scan services

Documents, folders, drawings, microfilm, maps, images, photos, dias, arial photographs.

For digital archiving, distribution and reproduction.

Digitally stored documents, whether from the administrative or the engineering office, can be retrieved fast and safely. They can be saved on compact digital media like CD or DVD for secure back up. Copies can be stored in fire-protected safe vaults. Digital document images can be retrieved and viewed on every PC in a network and may be reproduced on every plotter or printer connected.

An archive with 50.000 engineering drawings or 500.000 document pages A4 size requires less than 10GB of storage.

Digital archives do not need any special storage media as has been frequently asserted only a few years ago. They can be saved on the same magnetic disks as all other important corporate data.

For this purpose too the same back up tapes, CD and DVD can be used in the same way as for all data back up in a corporation.

Huge amounts of data exist today in most corporations, that have been stored in digital form, without that any significant problems did arise. Using continuous data back up and by transferring the data from time to time onto the most recent type of digital storage media it is possible today to store digital data for a long period of time.

Digitally archived data usually is saved in image formats like TIFF, JPG or BMP. There is plenty of software available from many vendors in order to view, print and store such such files. Structure and definition of these image formats is generally accessible and well known. Several of these softwareproducts are either available for free or integrated into some versions of Windows and Linux.

The filesystems of Windows and of Linux can store hundreds of thousands such image files. Special archiving systems are not necessary.

While scanning the original documents every image file is being indexed according to your requirements. The image files can later be retrieved by using for example the Windows Explorer and the directories and filenames created during the scan process.

Most versions of Windows provide a viewer for image data. For example the Internet Explorer or MS Imaging can display many common image file types. Office 2003 provides the integrated Microsoft office document imaging software for that purpose. Should these standard components not be sufficient for specific purposes we would be glad to name several suppliers of Viewer-Software who’s products beside displaying image formats usually support a multitude of CAD and text formats.

For the administration of large amounts of image files the use of a database software is advisable in the same way as for managing any other amount of large data. In the range of up to one hundred thousand image files an Access database will provide an easy to use yet powerful solution. For larger amounts of data the MS SQL server would be a good choice. The database is a tool for structuring the files saved as per the specifications and keywords given by the client. Using those keywords a drawing or document can be retrieved fast and easy. This technology does replace index file card systems and paper tables by computer databases in an efficient and yet low cost approach.
The use of special document management software (DMS) should only be considered if all documents (WORD, e-mail, Excel,…) in a company are organized by the use of special tools like MS Sharepoint Portal and the company wishes to integrate the scanned digital files in the same unified manner.

This is provided by JDS precision data entry service. We extract the content from thousands of index file cards and paper tables, even handwriting, and put into Access tables. In Access this indexing information can be organized in very flexible ways and it is connected with the location of the file in the filesystem. A click on the dataset in Access will automatically lead to finding and viewing of the related image of a drawing or document. Therefore the stored image files can be easiliy retrieved, viewed and plotted. For search, sort und managing the index data all the well known functionality of Access is available at your fingertips.