Apart from the widely talked-about benefits of safety and space savings from the digitization of paper, microfiche and microfilm documents, digitization also accelerates transportation and propagation of these documents, particularly as the Internet becomes increasingly popular in daily life and business. Gone are days when you anxiously wait for your mail delivery for an important document. The recent announcement of the century old "Newsweek" stopping publication of its paper version is a testament to this trend in the industry. With just a few mouse clicks, information can be downloaded and shared between parties thousands of miles apart.

Of course, none of this is possible without converting hard paper files to a digital format. Datum is well equipped to scan just about any kind of document including microfiche and microfilm. Documents as large as full size newspapers (about the size of A2 printing paper) can be scanned in a single run. Roller scanners have virtually no size limit. Non-contact scanners best preserve the integrity of scanned materials. Datum specialists are also trained to scan delicate, aged, and fragile historical documents.

Datum offers document scanning services for a fraction of in-house costs. Clients will receive high-quality scanning at very competitive prices, without the expenses of in-house equipment, software licensing and staff training. Datum offers a complete set of document conversion and scanning services.

Datum is widely recognized as a leading service provider for newspaper, book and magazine digitization and digital production of these documents from manuscripts. It has participated in projects like CADAL - the China-USA million digital books project. Datum has successfully digitized over 100 newspapers, over 1 million titles of books and magazines, numerous school books, family records, city annals, etc. Not only can Datum help digitize historical documents, it can also help produce digital documents for publication from manuscripts. Given the expansion of smartphones and tablets, it’s also critical that documents are able to be read on more than just computers.

PDF documents, as their name suggests, are truly portable, unlike many other file types, which may not translate to different devices. They can also be read on all operating systems of personal computers, PDA's, tablets, smartphones, etc., thanks to the availability of a free downloadable reader.

Depending on the conditions of use, there are three types of PDF scans to choose:

1. Single layer PDF: this is when a fully editable carbon copy of the original is desired. Graphic zones are turned into bitmaps. Text is scanned using OCR technology to become fully editable. This approach minimizes the size of the resulted document. The tradeoff is OCR errors must be corrected manually. The resulted documents are particularly suited for web publishing due to their small sizes.
2. Double layer PDF: Resulted documents have two parts. One is a visible part that is a direct scan of the original without OCR for either text or graphics. Another invisible layer is composed of the OCR scanned text and bitmap zones of graphics. Text is still searchable as with the single layer approach. OCR errors do not need to be corrected for all practical purposes. The invisible layer serves the purpose of carrying the meaningful content of a delimited area of the visible layer, which feed requests for operations like searching. This approach eliminates the need for manual OCR error correction and thus reduces overall processing costs. This approach is employed when file size and storage requirements are not an issue.
3. Direct scan: this will produce a bitmap image of the original without OCR. Important information such as subjects and keywords can be manually produced separately. The resulted document is not searchable.

Datum has helped convert these types of documents:

• Books
• Newspapers
• Magazines/periodical publications
• Microfilms
• Microfiche
• Library catalog cards
• Engineering drawings
• Medical images such as CT-scan, NMR scan, etc.
• ... and many more

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