Paperless Office

davids065 — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:04:02 +0000

The paperless office is now considered to be a philosophy to work with minimal paper and convert all forms of documentation to a digital form. The ideal is driven by a number of motivators including productivity gains, costs savings, space saving, the need to share information etc. Conversion of Paper based documents One key aspect of the paperless office philosophy is the conversion of paper documents, photos, engineering plans, microfiche and all the other paper based systems to digital documents. The technologies that may be used include

scanners
high speed scanners – used for scanning very large volumes of paper.
book copiers – that take photos of large books and manuscripts.
wide format scanners – for scanning engineering drawings
photo scanners
negative scanners
microfiche scanner – used to convert microfiche to digital documents.

digitization of postal mail – online access of scanned contents

Fax to PDF conversion – made possible by companies

Each of the technologies uses software that converts the raster formats into other forms depending on need. Generally, they involve some form of compression technology that produces smaller raster images or the use of Optical character recognition, or OCR, to convert the document to text. A combination of OCR and raster is used to enable search ability while maintaining the original form of the document. An issue faced by those wishing to take the paperless philosophy to the limit has been copyright laws. These laws restrict the transfer of documents protected by copyright from one medium to another, such as converting books to electronic format. An important step in the paper-to-digital conversion is the need to label and catalog the scanned documents. Such labeling allows the scanned documents to be searched. Some technologies have been developed to do this, but generally involves either human cataloging or automated indexing on the OCR document.