I like to think of myself as well travelled and on the ball, however on a recent trip to
outback Queensland in the far north of Australia my theory was well and truly put to the test.
I was involved in implementing the EDM functionality of the RecFind product for a local authority which I had worked with a number of times. Local authorities are some of my favourite sites to work with as they tend to use most components of the product.
Scanning documents was a major part of the project and during discussions a member of staff asked me could they scan dingo ears. I thought OK, easy answer to that one
as you just fold it over and flatten it out, thinking that “dog ears” are quite common on documents that have been well used.
The next question was “what about the plastic?”. Thinking that many old documents may well be in plastic covers my suggestion was that you may need to take it out of the plastic cover to scan it. A puzzled look at this point made me think about what I was suggesting so I thought I had better investigate the situation a bit further. It turned out that what I thought were “dog ears” on documents were in fact dingo ears, real dingo ears! The Council was taking part in a bounty program in which residents could bring in dingo ears to claim their bounty.
Needless to say the situation provided a few jokes during the rest of my time onsite and not one dingo ear made it through the scanner.
Dingo ears aside, the EDM project was a great success providing an easy and quick way for staff to access documents at their desk or out and about using a laptop. Use of the RecFind High Speed Scanning Module made processing large numbers of documents an easy task from the initial scanning, to staff accessing them as a fully searchable PDFs. The RecFind Button also made it possible for staff to store a wide range of documents from within the application in which it was authored, as well as email that could be captured directly from within each user’s mailbox.
Digitizing large numbers of paper documents should not be a traumatic experience. You provide the documents, we provide the expertise. And a couple of dingo ears if really desired….
GregK1Corp
NB: Greg is a long-serving member of the RecFind ‘Flying-Team’ of consultants and he spends a large part of his time on airplanes and in foreign locales savoring and enjoying the local wildlife as well as assisting our customers.