Across the United States, there are over 4 trillion paper documents. That number is increasing at a rate of 22% each year, which will become overwhelming in the near future. Thankfully, with document scanning and imaging digitization services, it's actually feasible to archive these documents across the digital realm forever.
From microfilm scanning services to paper document conversion services, this technology is essential for companies to keep track of their essential documents and save historic pieces, as well.
The New York Times has announced plans to undertake an extremely ambitious project: to digitize its entire historical photo library. The photo library began clipping and saving articles back in the 1870s and now holds tens of millions of historic news clippings, photographs, microfilm records, and other archival materials.
"We've always known that we were sitting on a trove of historical photos and now, cloud technology allows us to not only preserve this archival source, but easily search and pull photos to provide even more historical context," said Monica Drake, assistant managing editor at The New York Times. "Ultimately, this digitalisation will equip Times journalists with useful tools to make it easier to tell even more visual stories."
This digitization project will be difficult because of the sheer amount of documents that need to be digitized, but also indexing each one so they can be easily found, accessed, and used. Plus, since many of the images and clippings are more than a century old, preserving them needs to first be addressed prior to scanning.
"Cloud technology is allowing The Times to protect one of their most unique assets migrating from steel filing cabinets to a cloud-based platform where journalists can bring visual storytelling to a whole new level."
The archive has been named the "History of the world through the eyes of the New York Times."
Though large format scanning services are great, not every document digitization project involves hundreds of millions of professional photographs and archived news clippings, document, image, and microfilm scanning services
can be effective for companies of all sizes.
If you want to learn more about the importance of digital scanning services and work with experienced microfilm scanning services, give Scanning America a call today.
