Discounted Microfilm Scanning, Microfiche Scanning, Aperture Card Scanning, and Imaging Services

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Converting School Records to PDF

Scanning School Records is Our Speciality

convert college records

Generation Imaging is your one-stop provider for converting school records, including permanent record cards. We have helped numerous schools and school districts by scanning their records to PDF, JPEG, or TIFF.  The benefits are threefold: 1) disaster recovery; 2) space; and 3) instant retrieval.

Most schools keep their student records and personnel records  under lock and key, however they have no backup or contingency plan for a disaster. Sending the permanent records to Generation can solve that problem. Digitizing the records will allow the school to have electronic copies which can be loaded unto multiple computers, server, CD, or DVD.

 

There’s no question that an older school, college, or university can easily run out of room, especially with paper records. Even microfilmed school records cost space. However, converting records to digital eliminates the need to dedicate rooms for storage.

The third major benefit of converting school records to digital images is instant retrieval: no more hunting and searching through draws or using microfilm viewers. With digital school records, the images can be named by student, teacher, SSN, policy number, or other field. Once the school has the converted records, the files can be e-mailed and printed easily.

School, universities, and colleges have different methods of storing their permanent record cards. The media could be paper documents, manila envelopes, microfiche, or microfilm.

Although the end result is the same, the actual processes to convert documents to image, microfiche to image, or microfiche to image various and use different scanners.

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Converting Microfiche to PDF

Converting microfiche to PDF is most easily accomplished via a microfiche scanner. There are many different types of microfiche scanners made by various manufacturers and distributed by different resellers. Each type of microfiche machine has different quality settings. Using a flatbed scanner or photo camera is out of the question.

Buying a microfiche scanner may also be out of the question depending on your budget and technical experience. The best way to complete your microfiche to pdf project- regardless if you have one or one hundred thousand- is to have a microfiche to pdf company perform that service for you.

Damian Hospital and Dan Gandul, co-founders of Generation Imaging, have scanned thousands of microfiche to PDF jobs in these last few decades and have seen all types of fiche and variations. Your project would be in good hands.

The microfiche to PDF cost has been on the way down since 2006, due to many factors, including the increased speed of microfiche scanners, increased competition of those companies that use these services, and the trend of outsources microfiche to PDF overseas.

As wholesalers, Generation Imaging is able to keep the microfiche to PDF price as low as possible, all while keeping your project in Florida- with no outsourcing or “creative” server subcontracting.

Microfiche to PDF can result in single pages (one frame = one image) or multi-page PDFs (all frames on a microfiche = one ‘giant’ image).

Other file formats include microfiche to TIFF, microfiche to JPEG, microfiche to PNG, and other compression variants. Microfiche to PDF can result in greyscale or black-and-white images.

Please feel free to contact Generation Imaging for a microfiche scanning quote.

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What Are Microfilm Scanning Services?

At the most basic level, microfilm scanning services refers to digitizing roll film. In other words, it is the transfer from analog media to digital format. To break it down even further, it is roll film to tiff, pdf, jpeg, or other image format. The two types of roll film are 16mm and 35mm, not to be confused with movie film.

So in addition to the actual roll film conversion, is another component of microfilm scanning services?

Quality control. Some companies don’t actually check their work, or simply do a quick spot check before sending the project out. What happens is that he burden would get put on you to perform your own in-depth quality check. If you don’t have time or labor to perform a check, there would be a great chance that the images are incorrect, which is a nightmare. Generation Imaging performs four phases of quality control, which are including in our standard microfilm scanning services.

  • Phase 1: Generation Imaging’s scanner operators actually check their work during scanning. They check their settings. As a failsafe, each project has a project manager and supervisor to verify that the microfilm machines and specifications are correct.
  • Phase 2: Another worker or workers will audit the scan. The scanner will create a ribbon of the entire roll, and the auditor will manually verify, modify, and- if necessary- adjust quality or rescan the roll.
  • Phase 3: This is an intense quality control process that meets industry standards. It is performed by a separate quality control team. A significant percentage of images is checked. 100% QC and/or manually adjusting or manually cropping or manually splitting images are add-on microfilm scanning services.
  • Phase 4: The CD, DVD, or hard drive is checked and image counts are matched.

As you can see there is more to microfilm scanning services than just hanging a roll on the machine.

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16mm Cartridge Microfilm Conversion

Microfilm conversion is pretty much a catch all phrase that describes transferring roll film to digital image, such as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, or PNG. Most people visualize roll film as being like small versions of movie film in a mini-spool. Although the bulk of roll film is indeed like that, reels can also be enclosed in plastic cartridges.

There are a few kinds of 16mm roll film cartridges. Some are completely enclosed in a hard plastic, and are held together by screws and a snap mechanism. These were perhaps made famous by 3M, although other companies have produced and continue to sell these hard plastic film cartridges. Completely enclosed, they provide better protection from air, pests, and shipping.

Other 16mm cartridges are made of a lighter plastic and are open, and were created to be inserted into a large roll film shelf.

Generation Imaging has the capability to perform the microfilm conversion of 16mm cartridges.  Let us know if you have any file format and naming preferences. Otherwise, we will digitize the cartridges using standard microfilm conversion parameters, such as 200DPI bi-tonal TIFFs.

Generation Imaging has expert microfilm conversion scanner operators with the experience and technical know-how to convert roll film to digital images in a timely manner.

Most of the time it is more cost-effective to send G.I. your cartridges instead of purchasing a microfilm scanner. If you prefer to deal locally, and are located outside of South Florida, you may be disappointed in the quality of the final product and microfilm conversion pricing you are offered, so give Generation Imaging a try.

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Microfilm Conversion Steps: How To Start the Process

Getting Your Microfilm Conversion Started

  • Identify the media for microfilm conversion. Roll film can be 16mm and 35mm. You can measure the width of the film to determine this. 16mm can be on spools or cartridges, while there are no 35mm cartridges. Roll film is not microfiche (small flat cards), aperture cards (PC cards with a rectangle cut out for film), color slides, or movie film.
  • The term microfilm conversion refers to creating digital images from roll film. So choose an output format, such as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, or other standard image file formats. Do the folders or images need to be named a certain way? Will the files be single page or multipages?
  • Get an estimate as to how many reels are in the collection and around how any images are on a roll. To do that, you can use a rule of thumb of 2,000 frames for 16mm or 500 for 35mm, or you can measure an inch and count how many frames are in that inch. Then multiple that number by how long the film is (it may be indicated on the roll label). Otherwise, a rule of thumb could be 100 feet for thick film and 200 feet for thin film.
  • Contact Generation Imaging for your microfilm conversion quote and turnaround time.
  • Pack your film up and don’t leave any room for movement. Use any mail carrier you are comfortable with to send it to G.I. If you are local to South Florida you can drop it off or have us pick it up to perform your microfilm conversion.
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