Finding Your Documents – Does Your System Pass the Test?
Keywords: Data Conversion Service, Digital Conversion Service, XML Conversion Service, Digitization Service
Many organizations have extensive and growing archives of content. An organization maintains historical documents, photographs, and new research articles, databases, and industry reports. This content comes in many different forms, yet it can all be mined to create valuable resources for a modern digital-first organization.
It is common, perhaps far too familiar, for an organization that has been creating, collecting, and maintaining information for many years not to know what they have. With organizations busy and operating with lean staffing levels having a document management system that is up to date is often not a top priority.
It is also common for an organization that may have many documents in a digital format, such as PDFs, but the PDF documents are not set up to support search and retrieval functions. A valuable PDF that is not cataloged well and that may not be easy to access is a document that does not provide value to the organization. Information within PDF “image” files needs to be identified and tagged to be conducive to search and utility (not to mention making it accessible for the visually impaired).
We don’t just want to extract the text from a PDF document.
We may want to know the following:
- What does the text mean?
- What part of the extracted text is the title?
- What part is the author’s name?
- Who is the publisher, as this name may be different from the author or authors?
- What part is the document date?
- What part is the document series number?
We need to know much more than the letters on the page. There is much more meaning in any document than just the letter sequence. Source materials can be complicated. Source materials can have inconsistencies. Documents could have been created over the years, even decades, which would make inconsistencies the norm rather than the exception.
Before your documents can be scanned and loaded into a database, you need to closely examine what you have and set up the database to tag the documents’ information properly. Any organization will benefit by having a standardized set of fields for documents and records. This type of database will make it significantly more valuable to users.
Moreover, with proper due diligence and intelligent tagging, organizations set themselves up for success in their current endeavors and for future endeavors that have yet to be identified.
Document and Records Security
A data conversion process often requires security. By automating the data conversion processes, organizations can pass sensitive materials through fewer human hands. Suppose your data conversion project needs to ensure security. In that case, an automated process can transform confidential, complex forms and image-based PDFs to XML via a secure system and method that ensures proprietary information is kept private.
Technology Advances
Technology is constantly evolving. We want it to evolve. No matter what new technologies bring, one thing is sure: If your content isn’t tagged correctly, you and anyone who needs access to your documents will not be able to or have great difficulty in finding it.
Summary – Data Conversion
• Today’s users (the consumers of information) have high expectations for search and information retrieval, and organizations must restructure content to meet their needs.
• Working with an experienced data conversion company can ease your busy organization’s burden for your data conversion projects.
• Intelligent content tagging and database set up will unlock your data, making it easier for users to realize your information’s value.
• Well-structured data is paramount to true digital transformation.
How VASTEC Can Help
We are a data conversion company with extensive experience relating to digital data conversion services. VASTEC provides our clients with comprehensive solutions for your data conversion needs, and we work closely with you throughout the project to ensure all your requirements are met. Our data conversion specialists are experts in converting your document and data into web documents, digital libraries, mainframe data, text files, Excel worksheets, to cite a few examples.