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Digitization Services: A Vital Part of Your Disaster Recovery Plan

March 23, 2018/in Digital Collections, Disaster Recovery, General, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

Digitizing services are vital for a disaster recovery plan to electronically restore your collection when destruction hits. Maybe you already have a disaster recovery plan for the computer equipment you use in your home and office everyday (if not, get a free consultation with Anderson Technologies), but what about the priceless materials in your collection?

Whether you curate a museum with a significant compendium or want to make the athletic legacy of a school available online, consider data digitizing to sustain your treasures for when the unexpected happens.

Take, for instance, the 1966 flood of the Arno River in Florence, Italy. Over one million books and works of art were left waterlogged or worse, some still being restored as recently as 2013. The heart of the Renaissance was destroyed in less than a day.

Your organization’s collection is irreplaceable. But by establishing electronic archiving as a part of a disaster recovery plan, you can digitally preserve your materials forever—rain or snow, fire or flood. Data digitizing and electronic archiving create a safety net that protects your collection from disaster.

But It Could Never Happen to Me!

Yes it could, faster than you might imagine.

In 2009, a plane crash in the suburbs of Newark, NJ, took 50 lives and demolished a private collection of baseball cards worth $2.4 million. Insurance and diligent record-keeping of items in the collection provided the victim’s family financial compensation for the lost memorabilia. But because of the resulting fire, those items are permanently gone and will never be enjoyed again.

Fires, floods, earthquakes, sinkholes, avalanches, acts of war, and theft, are threats to a collection. While these tragedies aren’t preventable, complete loss of your irreplaceable materials is!

How Do I Protect My Collection from Catastrophe?

Digitization services use advanced document processing and electronic archiving techniques to create a digital article that can’t be touched by physical disasters. This data can be accessed through searchable online databases or simply kept in an external storage device.

Various data backup methods are available when considering digitizing services. Each individual client has differing needs, but Anderson Archival recommends using a combination of these three methods:

Onsite: This type of backup provides the fastest recovery in the event of data loss. A potential quick reinstallation is well worth the cost of backup software or physical media (host computer, external hard drives, or other electronic storage devices).
Offsite: This method is similar to physical or electronic onsite backups, but the device or software is kept safe at a remote location. Note the limitations of this type of backup: removable media can be lost or damaged, and it may take some time to move data from one location to another.

Of course, the collection itself can always be kept in a safe place. But fires and floods can happen in a warehouse just as easily as they can in your home or office. If the original collection’s site were affected by calamity, it would be wise to have a digital copy in another secure location.

Cloud-based: This type of backup can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection. Depending on how large your collection is and the kind of protection you need, this method can get expensive but as long as you have access to the internet, you can recover your entire collection in the event of a disaster.

One bright side of the 1966 flood of the Arno is that the art curators and librarians of Florence put their heads together to find the best ways to restore anything that wasn’t completely lost in the disaster. New historical preservation techniques they learned are still being used today. Even though external hard drives or cloud storage didn’t exist at the time of the worst natural disaster to ever hit Florence, they were able to salvage some of their heritage and put that caution into creating disaster recovery plans for the future.

Thankfully, we live in an age of digitizing services like those offered by Anderson Archival. For document processing and digitization services that focus on your passion for your collection, call us at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

Don’t Lose Your History: Utilize Historical Document Preservation Services

March 6, 2018/in Digital Restoration, Disaster Recovery, Document Scanning, General, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

Recorded history is a treasure that can never be replaced. That’s why our team is dedicated to preserving historical documents with accuracy and quality.

Time wears pages thin, and the valuable information recorded there becomes indistinguishable from the page itself. Light discolors the pages, and their edges crisp, fray, and eventually crumble. Dust can damage them, while flood and fire, theft, and other catastrophic events can destroy them forever.

Frequently, our own use of the pages eventually fragments them. Published pages, records, photographs, and hand-written letters were meant to be passed on to posterity, but the more they’re used, the more likely they are to sustain irreversible damage.

Here at Anderson Archival, we are committed to protect and save your precious collection with our historical document preservation services. We professionally preserve each page by digitizing it as an image and combining it with readable, searchable text, so you can continue to enjoy the contents well into the future while simultaneously adding functionality.

Save Your Historical Documents from Extinction: Digitize!

While books and documents eventually fall apart, at Anderson Archival we know how to make their contents live again. Digitization allows you to use, catalogue, share, print, and copy these preserved historical documents much more easily than using the materials themselves. And with easy search tools, you’ll be able to find topics instantly.

Don’t Lose Your Collection to Time or Disaster!

Think of the ancient scrolls of Alexandria lost forever to flames or the historical records incinerated during the book purge in Nazi Germany—volumes forever lost to future generations. Destroyed and damaged libraries such as these are incalculable cultural and intellectual losses. So many irreplaceable volumes have become lost. Don’t let this happen to your library!

Preserving historical documents has never been easier for experts, nor has it ever been so important. Let us help preserve your historical collection forever.

Historical treasures constantly come under threat. Over the last few years, catastrophic flooding in the Midwest and South has impacted areas thought to be safe from rising waters. The record flooding produced by Hurricane Harvey, the largest cyclone in US history, put previous safe havens at risk for the future.

University of Texas Library said, “With any storm of Harvey’s magnitude and destructive impact, staff are paying close attention and preparing for potential issues, but in the case of this hurricane and the position of its landfall, most proactive considerations gave way to planning how to react to whatever damage would inevitably be wrought upon the library and its collections.” The library was rescued as teams jumped in to save it almost immediately.

But what if it had been lost?

The Howard-Tilton Memorial Library of Tulane University was also greatly affected when Hurricane Katrina flooded it with over 8 feet of water, and “As a result, in the Howard-Tilton building alone more than 700,000 of the library’s individual print volumes and recordings were submerged underwater.” Eventually the library was able to salvage and restore 629,711 archival items, which is incredible. But that means over 70,000 items were lost.

When disaster strikes, people are the main concern. But what happens to the private collections stored at their homes another local place affected by the disaster? Unfortunately, many times the owners come back from safety to find the collections damaged beyond repair.

Catastrophes Can Happen Anywhere

Natural disasters aren’t the only cause of damage or loss to historical documents.

On September 11, 2001, the terror attacks not only took the lives of thousands of people; history was lost as well. The Library of Congress states,

The Pentagon sustained damage to its library, which contained more than 500,000 books and documents and a historical collection that dated to the early 1800s. The report said a private disaster recovery company was contracted to help stabilize the collections. The restoration efforts, which cost $500,000, were ultimately successful in saving about 99 percent of the book collection….
The extent of loss in private collections and some public collections may never be known.

Such unexpected horrors could happen anywhere, at any time. The moment of a tragic event is not the time to figure out how to save your historical collection. Let us help safeguard your treasures, so when disaster strikes, your collection is one thing you won’t have to worry about.

Do you have a collection you would like to keep preserved forever? Our digitization process will help you keep your documents safe and secure.

Anderson Archival Can Preserve Your Collection

Our historical document preservation services include (but are not limited to) the following documents:

Books
Hand-written letters
Journals
Documentation
Photos

Preserving historical documents is a multi-step process. Your documents are scanned to create top-quality images. We use Optical Character Recognition processes to clean and analyze the documents, and then our team proofreads for word-for-word accuracy. This level of true preservation quality is unique to Anderson Archival. After the proofing comes watermarking and adding metadata, leaving you with a digital document that can be indexed and searched.

Let Anderson Archival help you preserve your historical collection for generations to come.

Would you like to learn more? Visit our historical preservation services page for more information, or contact us at 314.259.1900 to talk to a preservation expert today.

Creating a Digital Library

February 2, 2018/in Custom Software, Digital Collections, General, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

Need to Convert Out-of-Date Historical Scans? Outsource OCR Services!

January 28, 2018/in Digital Collections, Document Scanning, General, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

Historical digitization services have been a part of preservation plans for decades, but the technology has improved dramatically. With optical character recognition (OCR), which creates the ability to search through the text of any scanned image, your collection has the potential to become a functional research tool for anyone viewing your digital library.

Converting historical scans can be a complicated process. The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative 2016 (FADGI) notes that “without staff with a good technical foundation, achieving the appropriate level of quality . . . is problematic. Cultural heritage digitization is a specialization within the imaging field that requires specific skills and experience.” Depending on the condition of your digital collection, it may be more cost effective to outsource OCR services than handle it in-house.

Bringing Out the Text from Scanned Images

Before starting any digitization plan, it is vital to know the quality of the images. Older image files, or those created without quality equipment, may no longer be suitable for preserving a collection into the future. The FADGI offers specific quality guidelines for digital scans to be considered suitable for OCR or other information processing techniques.

Many early scanning efforts may not offer the resolution or clear detail needed for OCR software to read text. In this case, any attempt to use image-to-text converting services requires new scans with updated equipment. That can get expensive if your organization doesn’t already have scanners or digital cameras capable of creating images of sufficient quality or the manpower to perform the scans. Your organization may find it more economical to hire a company that offers both scanning and image-to-text converting services to avoid buying expensive equipment.

Why Should You Outsource OCR Services?

If your scans are suitable quality to proceed without problems or need only minimal adjustments, then you can immediately begin converting your historical scans to readable text. OCR software is available for purchase, and a single employee can digitize your collection, but before you send them off for days of converting, consider this warning from the FADGI: “avoid the trap of assuming doing the work in-house will cost less. Insourcing may cost more than outsourcing.”

Even if you don’t need to purchase new scanners or digital cameras for your digitization project, it can still be beneficial to outsource OCR services. For all that OCR software is capable of, it still reads text like a computer, and that can mean countless errors in the conversion process. If your project requires a decently accurate rendering of the text, an employee must verify potential errors the software flags. If your project requires a high level of accuracy, another pass may be needed to review the text against the scanned image manually, word-for-word. All of this increases the amount of time you must devote employee resources to the project.

Anderson Archival’s historical digitization services provide you with staff already proficient with this process. Our employees can perform the same tasks with better resources and less downtime learning new software or what errors to watch for. This can ultimately save your organization money and resources in the long run.

If you are ready to outsource OCR services or want to learn more about image-to-text converting services, contact Anderson Archival by email at info@andersonarchival.com or by phone at 314.259.1900.

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