The Benefits of Digitisation
Digital document management offers significant benefits to the University of Oxford by enhancing efficiency, security and sustainability.
By transitioning from physical to digital records, the university streamlines administrative processes, enabling faster access to information and reducing manual effort.
Digitisation improves collaboration across departments, as staff and researchers can share and retrieve documents securely anytime, from anywhere.
Enhanced security measures, such as encryption and controlled access, safeguard sensitive information and reduce the risk of data breaches.
Additionally, digital systems facilitate compliance with data protection regulations by ensuring proper record-keeping and audit trails.
The shift to digital also supports the university’s commitment to sustainability by reducing paper consumption and associated waste significantly.
Over time, cost savings emerge from reduced storage needs and operational expenses.
Digital document management aligns with Oxford’s tradition of innovation, and empowers its adminstrative and academic community with tools that enhance productivity and support its global reputation for excellence.
From Old paper documents to indexed digitised documents
Document Logistix creates document management solutions that help eliminate the use of paper, improve records management and automate business processes.
The company also provides a high-volume scanning and document management service to clients who need to turn legacy paper records and document archives into digital files.
Charged with delivering a custom back-scanning project for The University of Oxford, Operations Director John Fernandes, turned to Kodak Alaris for support.
The Challenges: ancient, hand-written and marked documents
The University was looking to digitise individual students’ records, some of which were nearly 100 years old. The degree awards records had been created on card stock and contained information including the student’s name, date of birth, which college they attended, dates of the start and finish of studies, examinations sat and degrees awarded.
The records varied considerably, largely owing to different record-keeping practices over the years.
There was no consistency in style or format when recording any of the information, each record featured several people’s handwriting, unique markings, and incorporated a rainbow of ink types and colours – all of which presented a number of challenges in terms of capturing the information accurately and preserving the records for future generations to access.
Document Logistix in-house scanning bureau
Document Logistix used Kodak Alaris scanners in its in-house scanning bureau to fulfil the project within the agreed timescales. With more than half a million pages to be scanned and the fact that the original documents were challenging: throughput, quality and reliability were key criteria.
The scanner solution
Kodak Alaris’ Kodak i4650 Scanner is a production workhorse featuring a 500-sheet input elevator for continuous document feeding, with a straight-through paper path ideal for feeding the university’s heavyweight cards.
Exceptional image quality delivers crisp, clear images, which proved particularly important owing to the challenging fornat of the originals. Plus, controlled stacking functionality ensures that a neat, orderly stack of documents are returned post scan, which improves the efficiency of the process.
Additionally, the i4650 Scanner runs at full-rated speed, even with all image processing features running, which ensures high productivity levels.
Results and Benefits
Digitising the documents efficiently was a key business requirement, and the i4650 Scanner’s fast processing speeds and reliability delivered a real value-add.
“The major bottleneck we faced was the time it took to manually index data such as the students’ name and date of birth. With no consistency in format, style or even ink colour, this initial important step had to be manually input which took time.
As such, we scanned in batches of 20-30 cards at any one time, and the scanner powered through these in record time.
In fact, had we not been faced with resource constraints, we could have literally completed the project in half the time,” Fernandes explained.
Where the scanner from Kodak Alaris really stood out was in terms of its superior image quality. “The format of the original documents was really random, each one came with its own challenges, and the ability to accurately capture all of the information was a critically important factor for this project. We were very pleased with the results, ” Fernandes said, adding: “The scanner captured every mark on the cards, even things like entries underlined in different coloured inks, a myriad of ‘stamps’ that had been added through the years, and other unique snippets of information, the quality of the captured images overall was first-class.”
Document Logistix digitises 500,000 university records
Document Logistix processed some 500,000 images and completed the project on time. “The COVID-19 pandemic caused some delays in terms of the University’s ability to box and ship the records to us, but once on site, we were able to process these challenging, complex documents quickly and efficiently,” Fernandes noted.
University set-up to use digital document management
Oxford University was delighted with the results and now has a digital archive of the results of its older alumni, which was the overriding objective of the project. This online archive supplements existing online records of more recent records, and avoids the need for staff to visit the physical filing cabinets, which means staff to access the material directly and remotely.
The University considered this was a project that would not have been practical, or cost-effective, to undertake internally as it had neither the staff available, nor systems to deliver the solution. With Document Logistix providing an online cloud-based solution to access the records, it has been straightforward to integrate the new system into its regular processes.
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