Digitization and scanning are two very different processes. While scanning essentially takes a picture of a document and makes it available on a disc for storage or for printing, digitization stores the information contained in a document, picture or a sound file and makes it available in any type format of your choosing.
With this in mind you will need to plan your project for the type of service that you need, especially if you are planning to engage a provider to do the job for you. Some companies charge for their time and materials while others charge per item plus materials. The more organized you are, the quicker the project will be done and the less it might cost you.
What kind of materials to you need to archive? Many libraries and individuals are choosing to convert their obsolete recordings to digitized sound files. You might think that they would want to just buy a CD but many old vinyl records have not been converted to that format. There are some very rare, priceless recordings being preserved through digitization and if you have some you may want to do the same thing. Organizing the material, cataloging it and making a list of priorities will help your service provider to do exactly what you wish in the shortest possible time.
Newspapers are using scanning and digitization more and more in order to not only maintain accurate archives but to publish their information on their websites. In many cases, they outsource the work to providers that have high volume scanners. These commercial machines can turn the pages automatically and scan up to 2400 pages per hour! The latest machines are even used for fragile materials such as books or magazines that are one hundred years old or even older. Believe it or not, the machine is gentler with fragile pages than the human hand could ever be!
Scanning and digitizing are good options if you want to preserve or share corporate archives, government records and documentation, library collections, or fragile books and documents. Not only do these processes significantly reduce storage space—an entire room of books can be reduced to the space on one bookshelf—they provide a means to share the material with large groups of interested patrons or subscribers.
If you want to safely archive material that is written in a different language, you needn’t worry because machines are made that recognize 15 left the right languages and 5 right to left languages! That means if you want to preserve a precious antique document that is written in Hebrew or another Middle Eastern Language, you can take advantage of scanning in preserving that document.
Another advantage of digitization is the ability to search for an item electronically. Rather than scan through tables of contents in a book or newspaper, you can do a quick electronic search and find what you are looking for in seconds. This is particularly important for researchers, students and corporations. Imagine being able to instantly find a destination of a map or a certain sector of an architectural drawing! Scanning and digitization more than pay for themselves in terms of man hours as well as aggravation.
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