Aperture Card Scanners: Six Steps to a Successful Digitizing Project

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Aperture Card Scanners

• Six Steps to a Successful Digitizing Project

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Aperture Card Scanners
Six Steps to a Successful Digitizing Project
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Aperture Card Scanners

• Aperture Card scanners are machines that scan the
  contents of aperture cards and produce a digital
  file. These types of cards are popular for
  archiving data.
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• An aperture card is a punched card that has a
  microfilm chip affixed in a cut-out window.
  Usually 35mm tall, the microfilm chip contains a
  reduced image of a reference document. An
  example might be an engineering drawing.
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• Although still used in many archiving projects, a
  greater number or organizations prefer to
  digitize aperture cards to provide a duplicate
  format or an entire replacement. Using aperture
  card scanners for a digitizing project requires
  carefully following six typical steps.

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Aperture Card Scanners

• Retrieve Your Cards.
• Make sure you locate the cards you want digitized
  and retrieve them from storage.
• Transport them to where youll be using your
  aperture card scanners.
• When it comes time to organize the cards for
  scanning, office staff cant find them and time
  is wasted tracking them down. Its better to
  know early in the project if youll need to bring
  in extra staff to help find all the aperture
  cards for your project.

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Aperture Card Scanners

• Assess the Condition of Your Cards.
• Aperture card scanners can efficiently automate
  the digitizing process. However, cards in poor
  condition or not made to industry standards could
  cause delays in your production.
• If aperture cards were produced during different
  time periods, industry standards may have been
  interpreted differently.
• The various interpretations would affect the end
  results and thus the digital formats produced by
  the aperture card scanners.
• Examples of issues affecting scanning might
  include magnification ratios, resolutions, film
  densities, image contrasts, image centering and
  more.

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Aperture Card Scanners

• Evaluate Scanned Images.
• After using aperture card scanners, you need to
  make sure your have quality digital images.
• Further work may be necessary, such as cropping
  and sizing images, or removing specks caused by
  dirt on the film.
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• Use Meaningful Indexing.
• Once your files are converted to a digital
  format, you will be able to index them for easy
  retrieval. But, you need to decide on a
  structure to simplify the process as much as
  possible.
• For example, you need to coordinate the source of
  the index information, such as a database or
  document.

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Aperture Card Scanners

• Decide on File Format.
• When scanning with aperture card scanners, you
  can output your images to a variety of digital
  file formats.
• Common formats include PDF and TIFF.

• Determine What to Do with Your Cards.
• Depending on the content, many companies may keep
  them as another form of backup.
• Storage requires proper environmental conditions.
  
• You also need to consider security and cost in
  your cost/benefit analysis.
• If you decide to dispose of your cards, careful
  planning needs to become part of the project.

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Aperture Card Scanners
Using aperture card scanners with these six steps
can help provide a formal process for your
project and identify requirements. Companies
need to understand the impact on staffing and
budget resources before any project begins.
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About the Author
Kevin D'Arcy is VP of Sales and Marketing for MES
Hybrid Document Systems, Ontario's leading
document scanning and document management
supplier. For more information about Aperture
Card Scanners, visit http//www.mesltd.ca.