Digital Archiving services
Preserving or archiving digital information is not new at present and has been explored at a variety of levels over the past few decades. Previously, documents were placed on the shelves sometimes with a card catalogue. Whenever the inclusion of new material is necessitated, some of the old materials were removed and stored off-site, which is appropriately viewed as an archive. These physical archives had a specific and limited shelf life depending on the medium on which the content is stored. In the current digital age, archiving is in the digital form- transferring the content electronically to new media for the purpose of preservation. SBL BPO makes end-to-end management of your valued documents and preserves them for generations to come.Digitization
Digitization has become the need of the present time. The process in simple terms is making data present in the hard copies digitally available. Documents, all over the world are available as piles of papers, or discs or other form of hard copies and though they form authentic proof, the accessibility is a problem when faced with an emergency.Purpose of digitization
Data in hard copy format is easily susceptible to damage and often they are mishandled. Once the damage is done, they can never be retrieved or managed. On the other hand, if they are converted to digital format, they will remain intact for further use in the future.Though the process seems to be simple, it goes through various intricate and detailed stages which need the finesse of experienced personnel for handling such documents and to save them digitally.
The vital divisions of digitization are collection, handling, preparation, scanning, retrieval, storage and preservation.
Collection
The documents need to be identified depending upon their characteristics. This procedure might sound easy but has to be managed with utmost care. Many of the documents are age-old and some will be in torn form. These documents in such fragile condition have to be collected from different locations without causing any plausible damage to them.Handling
Specialized mechanisms are needed in handling documents as they come in different forms. As mentioned above, those documents which are age-old and torn need special methods of handling them. Some need thin plastic coats to preserve them for future use. This needs people with expertise to do the job.Preparation
Many of the documents in paper or other hard copy formats which are shelved would be completely dusty and would not be in a presentable way. All documents are cleaned to ensure data readability. For the documents which have a tendency to tear on usage are coated with thin plastic films that hold its structure rigid.Scanning
The prepared and cleaned documents are then ready to go through scanning process. There might be instances when the images have been captured incomplete or some data appears missing due to the settings. This could be re-scanned. The scanned documents are then indexed according to the data they contain and tagged accordingly.Storage
In digital archives, there may be many levels of storage on the basis of expected use for the retrieval. Hence the next step is to allocate storage spaces for the data depending on the requirements of data volume. If the volume of data is huge, it needs to be stored in different location with enough storage capacity.Preservation
Preservation or protection of the documents is a major process in the line as different forms need different ways to preserve them for the future. Dry brushing/dry cleaning, solvent cleaning, chemical preservation, lamination etc are some of the methods used to preserve the documents from environmental hazards.Complexity and accuracy requirements
This is another vital task in the digital archiving of documents because interpretation of different styles of documents and different forms of inscriptions is a complex one. They can be interpreted, handled and converted by only experienced experts in the field. This demands accurate information on the documents which are digitized.SBL's BPO division caters to all the processes of digital archiving of your documents and houses extremely experienced personnel to handle all its procedures with utmost care. SBL's BPO processes are supported by our efficient software team who has developed DMS software for the end-to-end management of documents.