Associated with the growth of unstructured content is the growth of physical documents that are being stored for long periods of time, taking up vast areas of expensive office space. One way to reduce these costs is to convert physical content into legally admissible digital images in a move to make unstructured content more manageable.

This turns physical content into digital content – the benefits of which are that information can then be managed and easily shared across various locations. However, this also presents challenges in terms of having to manage the legal liability arising from the distribution and use of content copies. Such challenges can be averted by implementing a strategic information asset management (IAM) programme.

At a high level, the image conversion process involves the following;

• Document batching and collection
• Preparation of documents for scanning
• Scanning prepared documents
• Indexing of resultant images
• Formatting and output of images
• Quality assurance checks

To aid categorisation and subsequent retrieval of images, indexes and document types can be classified automatically during the scanning process by use of bar-codes. Bar-coding technology also maintains throughput speeds and indexing accuracy, which are some of the main issues affecting the process.

An example where use of bar-codes has proven to be beneficial is in the generation and use of unique barcodes on patch separator sheets which are manually inserted before each new document within a batch, prior to scanning.

These separator sheets are scanned along with the rest of the batch. The barcodes upon them are automatically read by scanner hardware and translated into a document type code for each document. The unique Index Number is also picked up by the scanner and saved against the resultant image.

The bar code standards typically supported by the systems are EAN 13, EAN 14 and EAN 128, amongst others.