Document imaging may help. Imaging refers to storing a paper document in electronic form. For example, if you wanted to cut out this article and save it electronically, you would first put the paper through a scanner, which looks a bit like a copying machine and works a bit like a fax machine. Next, you index the facsimile using the document imaging application on your desktop computer. Instead of putting the document in a paper folder, where you are indexing it by one subject index, you can use document imaging software to assign many indexes to the document. This allows you to file the article in your "office management" electronic folder and your "neat technology" electronic folder. The image will then be saved on an optical disk.
To retrieve an image of the document, start the document imaging application, bring up the "Search" screen and enter your search arguments, such as "technology." All documents that have been indexed with the word "technology" will be listed on your screen. You select the ones you want to look at, and the image appears on your screen.
There are a couple of other nifty features you can add to this scenario. You might OCR the article. OCR stands for optical character recognition and it creates an ASCII text version of the image. In other words, it interprets the image into alphabetic letters that can be understood by your word processing program. If you want to copy part of this article into a proposal you are writing for your boss, you would bring up the OCR output file within your word processing application. Now, you would simply copy portions of this article to your proposal. (You have my permission to do this.)
If the "work flow" feature is included in your document imaging application, you will be able to electronically route your image of this article to your colleague along with a personal note.
Before you rush out and buy a document imaging system, though, consider the following issues: How will you share this image with other people in your department or among people in different departments? How can you protect yourself from buying technology that will be obsolete tomorrow? Will the system grow with your growing needs? What if you want to relate the image to data from one of your other systems? Will the system save you money?
The Document Imaging Team in ITD which has been considering these questions, has located a vendor to meet the growth and document sharing needs at Emory. We are busy testing their products now, and hope to be able to give you clear answers soon to "which system do I buy," "how do I buy it?" and "how do I implement it in my department?" Until then, if you would like to investigate this further, contact me at 727-7664 and let me know you are interested. I will put you in touch with the Document Imaging Team and other interested people. Also, you can learn more about this topic on the web at http://www.emory.edu/ITD/MMC/DI/ page.one.html, or under the "What's new" link on the Emory Home Page.
Julia Leon is indirect support coordinator in the Information Technology Division.