Document Imaging Needs to Change (Documents, That Is)

Paper isn't all bad.

For example, with a piece of paper, you can change the document. You can manually cross out words, add new words--break out a bottle of White-Out, even.

Document imaging, as an information management mechanism and as an industry, must also develop tools to make documents changeable.

This process is underway but not perfected.

The most important tool as of now is Optical Character Recognition technology, or OCR, which we've blogged about previously. If you're interested in document imaging, you should be watching this technology like a hawk.

OCR changes things because it lets you change things. And people and organizations who use document imaging--laywers, hospitals, real estate brokers, etc.--often need to make changes to documents.

With OCR, an Adobe PDF document can be easily converted into a Microsoft Word document, so that the document can be amended after it's been scanned into digital form.

Here is a short explanation of how, generally, to turn a PDF into a Word doc.

Things are changing. Scanned documents need to be changeable, too, if document imaging is really going to challenge paper as the dominant medium for valuable information.