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Imaged Documents Imaging is a technology that stores documents as electronic photographs in a computer system. These digitized computer files of documents are known as images. An imaging system consists of a computer, scanner, document management software, storage device, workstations, and printers. A page is sent through a scanner and “scanned”. When scanned, the document is converted into a “bitmap” image. The bitmap is composed of tiny dots represented by dpi (dots per inch). It is then stored on a computer disk. After checking for quality, the image is indexed for later retrieval (since the image itself cannot be searched). However, if the image is scanned using OCR software, the words on a document are converted to ASCII machine-readable text that can be subsequently edited or searched like a word processing file.
Document imaging systems enable a law firm to manage and control the documents in a case by maintaining images of the documents in the computer. Key information of the document is indexed to identify the document for later retrieval. For cases, witness can view the images chronologically, or by legal issue ? it depends on how you indexed the document. There are three primary uses of imaging:
Imaging Process
Format. The de facto standard for a document image is TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), which is also the standard for fax machines. A TIFF image can be altered and changed by simple computer graphics programs.
Storage and Retrieval. Images can be stored on floppies, hard drives, and optical disks, or on CD-ROM. The primary storage device is CD-ROM. The major reason that imaging was not popular prior to the CD-ROM revolution is that there was not a low cost storage media available to handle the large amounts of storage required for images. Approximately 20,000 - 50,000 bytes of space are needed per image. Thus, 50 - 100 images will require approximately 1 to 5 megabytes of storage. A CD-ROM can hold up to 15,000 document pages, depending on the density of the document and the dpi at which the document is scanned. Images are generally retrieved using a CD-ROM player. CD-ROM players are built to hold one, 4, 6, or hundreds of CD-ROM disks. The larger players are referred to as jukeboxes, since they resemble the old jukeboxes that played records. Output. Images can either be viewed on your monitor or printed out. Generally, after searching a database, the multiple records and images linked to the records are printed for trial books or witness kits, etc. Integration and linking to full text or databases. An image is a piece of electronic paper. Like actual paper, it cannot be searched for specific words like full text documents. For this reason, your imaged document must be LINKED to an index, database, or full text document. Then, when you want to retrieve the document, locate the abstract of the record in your database. The image will be linked to that record. It can then be retrieved for viewing. |