Scanning Bureau

PIA is one of the country’s leading scanning bureaus; situated on the borders of Hampshire and Dorset. At our bureau offices we can deal with a complete range of paper document which are to be electronically archived. We can store up to approximately 30,000 sheets of A4 paper per CD-ROM and up to 3000 large format A0 drawings per CD-ROM.

As well as digitising paper based documents and photographs, PIA also has the facility to convert existing microfiche and microfilm archives to electronic files and incorporate them into the resultant document management solution (DMS).  This includes conversion of microfiche, aperture cards & 16mm or 35 mm roll film.

Scanning Process

We  scan all paper-based documentation  at mainly 300dpi (depending on quality of original). There will be full OCRing (Optical Character Recognition) of every word of every page of very document allowing full text search and interrogation. We tend to scan to Adobe Acrobat PDF Files and create 2 tiered PDF files - the top level being the 100% facsimile image - the bottom level being the OCR’d text. The end result will be a multi-page PDF file for each file/record. For each PDF File created, we will also provide an associated .txt or .rtf file with the OCR’d text (in order that it can be imported into the on-line Retrieval solution for fast searching capabilities).

Storing, Indexing and Searching

At PIA, we understand that it is all very well having 20,000 sheets of A4 paper or 3000 A0 drawings on one CD-ROM, but you do need to be able to retrieve them, quickly and efficiently.

Thus, our software indexing solutions can mirror your current manual filing system 100%. Take the example of an electronic filing cabinet.  A filing cabinet contains drawers, which in turn contain folders, which in turn contain binders, which in turn contains documents. Any of these sections can be searched upon by the index fields you specify for each document (e.g. drawing number, author, building etc.) within any level or by moving down the hierarchical tree until you get to the section you require.

Scanning Bureau

Our Systems...

Documents we can scan

  • Normal A4 paper
    We have the capacity to scan and electronically convert between 12,000 and 40,000 A4 sheets of paper per day.
  • B&W (black and white) documents
    From the size of a business card through to A0 in size including engineering diagrams, maps, architectural plans etc.
  • Colour documents
    From the size of a business card through to A0 (47 by 33 inches) in size can be scanned in and digitally stored.
  • Colour photographs
    Up to 3000 per day.