800,000 pages, one month ahead of schedule, 28 percent under budget. That sentence is the whole pitch, and it is why this page leads with it instead of a scanner specification.

Government document digitization is bought on two things: whether the indexing will be right, and whether the schedule will hold. Image quality is table stakes, and every vendor claims it.

The reference

A federal agency required digitization of 800,000 pages under strict indexing and reporting requirements. We completed the scanning and structured indexing one month ahead of schedule and 28 percent under budget, meeting every agency quality and reporting standard.

That is the engagement we would want screened against any requirement in this space, and we will supply the detail behind it for a proposal or a past performance questionnaire.

Why indexing, not scanning, is the risk

Scanning is a throughput problem with a known answer. Indexing is a judgment problem, and it is where agency digitization projects fail.

Unitization decides where one document ends and the next begins. Get it wrong and a forty-page permit file becomes six records, or six unrelated memos become one. File-level versus document-level indexing changes what the agency can search afterwards. A naming convention chosen for convenience rather than for the file plan produces a deliverable that is technically compliant and functionally unusable.

None of that is recoverable cheaply. It is decided at the scanner by people who understand what the index is for.

The standard this work is held to

The Department of Justice’s Mega 3 statement of work for automated litigation support, dated 1 June 2007, remains the clearest published statement of what agency-scale digitization is expected to meet. It is old — read it as a benchmark, not as current terms — but the thresholds are instructive because they are absolute rather than sampled.

• Numbering must be performed with 100 percent accuracy.
• File level indices shall be 100 percent accurate to the file information available to the indexers.
• File and document integrity and order must be maintained to a level of 100 percent accuracy.
• Work failing to meet these standards shall be rejected.

On images it specified predominantly TIFF Group IV, single page per image file, 300 dpi, with color predominantly JPEG, and OCR producing computer-readable ASCII data.

On volume it contemplated a maximum required throughput of 300,000 pages organized, prepared and indexed at file level per day and up to 2,000,000 images in any one-week period, with delivery within three business days of source documents being made available — and it stated there is no minimum order limitation or daily minimum image guarantee, which cuts the other way and is worth knowing.

What we deliver

• Images to the specification in the task order — resolution, compression and color handling as specified, not as defaulted
• Structured indexing at file or document level, to the agency’s scheme and naming convention
• Unitization and family relationships recorded as found, with the decisions documented
• Document-level OCR text, named to match the images
• Load files built for the platform the agency actually uses
• Quality reporting at the interval and in the format the COR requires
• Objective coding where the requirement calls for fielded data rather than full text

Logistics, which is half the job

Boxes come in by courier from an agency office, a federal records center or a contractor site, and go back on an agreed schedule. Originals stay in our Arlington facility unless the agency directs otherwise, and where a collection cannot leave the building, we work on site. Controlled unclassified information is handled under the applicable CUI requirements and the agency’s handling instructions.

What we do

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. runs government document digitization from Arlington, Virginia — high-volume scanning, structured indexing to the agency’s scheme, quality reporting, load-file delivery and documented unitization, with a federal reference delivered a month early and well under budget.

Small business, minority-owned, SAM registered, prime or subcontractor.

Related: document scanning services Arlington VA, document scanning Washington DC, paper to ESI conversion, bibliographic coding services, government litigation support contractor, litigation support subcontractor, legal document scanning services.

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. digitizes from Arlington, Virginia, with courier pickup across the District of Columbia, Maryland and Northern Virginia and on-site work where a collection cannot be moved.

Have a digitization requirement with an indexing scheme attached? Send us the scheme and the volume. The indexing conversation is where these projects are won or lost. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com