3 Reasons to Select Digital ReeL as your Microfiche Scanning Service Provider

Microfiche scanning is no longer an optional activity. Information is the lifeblood of most businesses and government entities. With the growth in customer expectations, the increased need for document compliance and the increased speed with which documents need to be gathered, it’s imperative to have a well thought out process for your organization’s document conversion requirements – including your microfiche scanning service requirements. Outsourcing this microfiche scanning activity can provide immediate, significant financial improvement to your bottom line. BMI Imaging Systems outlines 3 significant reasons to evaluate Digital ReeL as your microfiche scanning solution.

Document Conversion Definition
The process of scanning (imaging) a paper document and extracting key information (indexing) for purposes of backfile conversion and retrieval or day-forward scanning.

Reason #1: The Digital ReeL Microfiche Scanning Solution is Affordable
Organizational budgets are as tight as they have ever been and every potential project is up for budgetary scrutiny. Microfiche archives are often an area that your company might neglect due the legacy nature of the technology and the fact that the information is infrequently accessed. However, record retrieval customer service levels can suffer if your information sits on microfiche. Deterioration and broken reader printers can also be cause for concern and a reason to invest in a microfiche scanning solution.

The Digital ReeL microfiche scanning solution has been specially designed with affordability in mind. BMI Imaging has been scanning microfiche, microfilm and aperture cards for decades and we have fine-tuned our own, internal microfiche scanning processes. Our efficiency is your gain because we are able to offer the Digital ReeL microfiche scanning solution at half the price of competing microfiche scanning services.

Reason #2: Microfiche Scanning Accuracy
Many organizations don’t fully realize the impact on organizational archives that a conversion project like a microfiche scanning service can have on their records. Standard microfiche scanning services will miss a certain percentage of your archives as the information is converted from microfiche to digital files. For example, many standard microfiche scanning services dissociate each image from the microfiche as it is digitally converted. In some cases, the microfiche scanning machines may miss an image as they are converted the film. In other cases, the actual image is converted, however the manual key entry is performed incorrectly, resulting in a lost image because it will not be indexed correctly and thus never appear in a search result. Even microfiche scanning services that offer 99% scanning accuracy can still result in thousands of lost images.

Digital ReeL is different because BMI scans the entire microfiche during the microfiche scanning process. Essentially, we create an archive of virtual, digital microfiche rather than an archive of lots and lots of images. Because of this, you can visually ensure that your entire archive as been digitally scanned during the microfiche scanning process.

Reason #3: Digital Image Quality with Adjustable Grayscale
The Digital ReeL microfiche scanning solution includes a software application that resembles a reader printer. Users simply scroll through and navigate to the virtual microfiche they are seeking – no more physical microfiche searches, loading the microfiche to a physical reader printer or maintaining physical reader printers for users. Digital ReeL presents everything in digital form – the microfiche as well as the reader printer application that is available from a computer workstation (Digital ReeL also includes a web browser version).

Users are able to optimize the quality of each microfiche and each image using a technology called adjustable grayscale. Grayscale adds a photographic quality to each microfiche which makes it easier to view. Users have the ability to adjust the grayscale using contrast and brightness icons within the Digital ReeL interface. In this way, users can fine-tune difficult-to-read, even illegible images prior to printing, emailing and saving. The adjustable nature of Digital ReeL’s grayscale feature is what makes it unique to the industry.

In Summary
Outsourcing your microfiche scanning project to BMI and using Digital ReeL as your solution can help you not only achieve a rapid ROI, but can also help you improve service levels to your clients without adding to staff. This may be particularly important if your organization has faced extremely tight budgets and has few staff resources but high inventories of microfiche with information that needs to be accessed by individuals. An outsourcer like BMI Imaging has the economies of scale that your company may not be able to replicate. In addition, BMI Imaging has a unique microfiche scanning solution, Digital ReeL, that hundreds of organizations across the country have taken advantage of.

Contact us at (408) 736-7444 to learn more about the Digital ReeL microfiche scanning solution.