Physical tribal documents, no matter how well preserved, can be incredibly time-consuming to manage — not to mention, they’re at constant risk of being damaged or lost.
Laserfiche Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software makes it simple to scan, clean up, annotate and safely store digital copies of decades worth of tribal documents. Let's look at how to digitize documents and explore why Tribal Governments benefit from indexing large amounts of once-physical data in this way.
How To Digitize Documents With Laserfiche
Learning how to digitize documents is a simple process with Laserfiche. The Basic Scanner tool automates much of the work that was once left to tedious manual image editing. Follow these steps when digitizing your documents.
1. Gather and Sort Your Documents
If your files are already well-organized, this process may be easy. If not, it could take some doing, but the result is worth the effort. This first phase is the perfect time to filter out incomplete or irrelevant documents for your digital database. Tribal documents are preserved for historical purposes, of course, but not every piece of information filed away meets the standard of archival material by default.
2. Launch Basic Scanner
Next, launch the basic scanner from the location you want to store your files. When using Laserfiche for the first time, install the scanning component onto your computer. Open Laserfiche scanning from the toolbar, select “Standard Mode” and connect to the scanner of your choice.
3. Set Up Templates
You'll set up a template for each document type, plugging in the relevant metadata as necessary. Metadata, or the keywords and information tied to each document, make it easy to sort and search through vast libraries of information.
4. Clean Up Documents
Using the options in the Basic Scanner tool can automate much of the cleanup related to scanning documents. You'll be able to:
- Remove blank pages
- De-speckle marks on older or copied documents
- Re-orient pages that defaulted to the wrong orientation while scanning
- Eliminate jagged edges
5. Test Out Processing Options
Before applying the cleanup options to all your documents, test them by scanning a sample document. Click “Scan Sample Image” in the bottom right corner.
6. Scan Your Documents
Finally, click “Start Scanning” to scan your documents. Your pages will show as thumbnails at the bottom of the page and you can navigate them by clicking through the thumbnails or using the arrow tool.
Reasons To Digitize Documents With Laserfiche
Preservation
The primary reason to digitize documents is preservation. Even the most secure, well-kept documents are at risk without backups. Distributed, digital documents that follow best backup practices take away that risk entirely.
Searchability
Metadata searches make it easy to sort through documents by type, date, or specific strings of text. The searchable database saves time locating documents by filtering out content that Tribal Government workers don’t need.
Browsing
Browsing is easier, too, when leveraging Laserfiche to organize documents properly. For example, you can create a library of council governance documents, separating them from less relevant data. Decades of laws and policies can be explored at will, without worrying about handling sensitive historical information with one physical copy.
Preserve Your Tribe’s History With OneTribe and Laserfiche
Laserfiche makes the same level of powerful database management available to Tribal Governments that the federal government uses. In combination with OneTribe, our powerful, cloud-based member services platform, it’s easy to digitize your Tribal Government’s operations while preserving the history and integrity that came before it. To learn more, contact us for a demo today.
