An Issue of Standards: Document Imaging Needs Those

There are about five major trade groups devoted to advancing the interests of the document imaging industry. Here is a good list of those, for your reference.

Among those, there is one organization that works specifically to promote a particularly important need of the document imaging industry: standardization. TWAIN was founded in 1992 and has been very aggressive since then, agitating for greater and greater standardization between the great variety of hardware and software that make up this large community.

The fact that this organization (a not-for-profit) has been around so long, since the early days of document imaging and scanning, not only attests to the foresight of its founders, but encourages all of us to appreciate--and, more than that--use this standardization to better effect.

Sharing scanned document is, once again, the prime example of this better effect. The TWAIN board of advisors is a who's who of the document imaging industry, which might imply that they'd be too competitive with each other to cooperate, but the opposite is true.

Because sharing scanned documents empowers all players in the market. TWAIN is a testament to that. If you are interested in becoming a member of this organization, visit this page. You can sign your company up to head a sub-group supporting the larger mission of standardized, work-together document imaging systems, worldwide.