Bridgette,
I am very familiar with the TeleFORM product by Cardiff that someone else
has already mentioned. We have been using it for almost 7 years. It does
what Chris described - OCR on any portion of a form you want, then export
that data to a database along with the image. Related to Mary's comment and
general concerns about quality control vs. human effort, if applicable you
can force the index information to be validated against a database or do
other checks to be sure you are getting accurate data. This is controlled
by scripting you can write or contract someone to write for you.
TeleFORM has a lot of flexibility, including the ability to scan documents
where the index information is not always located in the same place. As
long as there is something that can point the software to the location of
the data, it can find it automatically and OCR/ICR it. I haven't used this
particular feature because we have control over the creation of the
documents we are indexing, so everything is located in the same place every
time. I have looked into it, though, because I would like to use it someday
for some documents we don't currently index but should.
TeleFORM didn't used to save in PDF format, but I think it might now. We
have adapted to that on our own and haven't looked into whether they have
added this feature.
I don't love everything about TeleFORM, so this isn't an advertisement - but
we have looked at other software over the years and keep coming back to
TeleFORM because it does everything we need, reliably. However, its
strongest feature for us is the forms design module, so you may find other
products that can do the same things on the scanning/indexing end of the
process if you don't need to design forms. TeleFORM also has a lot of
internet and other capabilities you may not need, because it is meant more
for data collection than for document management or archiving. It doesn't
have any features to manage the images after you create the index from them.
Good luck! Let us know what you decide to do.
__________________________________________
Sue Styles
Information Services Supervisor
American Proficiency Institute
1159 Business Park Drive
Traverse City, MI 49686
P: 800-333-0958 ext. 3017
F: 231-941-7287
E: [log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Hilliard, Mary
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 4:39 PM
from Bridgette King
My question - are there any systems that I can implement that will provide
auto indexing? I know that we can do this with the use of barcodes...
Are there any other alternatives?
from Mary Hilliard
It depends on the software you are using for scanning. We have documents
that are indexed from a database and we also have an application in which
the indexing data resides on a mainframe so we download the information and
created a document separator/cover sheet with the bar-coded indexes and
there is also a place where checkboxes are used to identify the document
type (this information is not in the database).
Mary Denker Hilliard
Systems Analyst
Office of Information Resources
University of Texas System
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
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