Using a Large Format Scanner for Historic Archiving

Large format scanners are not crucial for everyday activities. A normal scanner can easily handle documents of legal or letter size which an office is likely to come across. The large format scanners are really only needed for extremely large applications. They are often used, for example, in architectural offices in order to copy building plans, by engineers or lawyers who need to archive and store maps or oversized historic documents, or in historical libraries where large numbers of old documents are scanned either for storage purposes or as a shortcut to transcribing their data by hand.

Scanning and OCR and Document Transcription

Transcription is an interesting property of scanners, large format or otherwise. Optical character recognition, or OCR, allows a document to be scanned into a computer and then turned into text. Many scanners come with software that includes OCR and imaging functions.  When using OCR software, the computer actually looks at the image of the document that was scanned and can see what characters are on the page and turns them into words in a text document.

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OCR is still not perfect, and might not ever be. Particularly with historic documents that you might want to scan with a large format scanner, the text sometimes comes out garbled when you try to convert the image.  Many times the characters used on old documents are different from what we use today, the print is faded, or the paper quality is less than desirable.  Even so, the large format scanner will still save some time in transcribing documents to text, but proofreading and correcting the mistakes from images translated from the large format scanning software can be quite time-consuming.  For older documents that are of poor scanning quality, some archivists will type them  by hand. 

Although there are problems with OCR conversions, historic archiving and preservation remain the most interesting and promising uses for large format scanners.  Some collectors have interesting old artworks and manuscripts, sometimes written on bark or woven fibers in fading inks. These historical crafts are costly to restore and decay is inevitable. Humidity, mold, insects, or poor storage can contribute to their continued decay.  Large format scanners are big enough that even medieval tapestries can be scanned on their surface with pretty high quality resolution. They can be easily be stored electronically, either on disks or on a computer.  Additionally, digital or electronic file storage is easy to categorize and index.

"Large Format Scanners for Historic Archiving," contributed by Cathy Johnson