Born in the 20th century, digitisation is a derivative of the word digital, which signifies data represented by numbers. The reason why digitisation projects are flourishing in all fields today is mainly because this method offers many advantages for both the treatment of traditional documents and for images or objects.
For a practical and fast conservation
Digitisation transforms an analogue signal, whose variations are continuous, into a series of digital values. This method enables the conversion of physical documents to a digitally coded format that ensures better conservation.
The entire content and layout of a document on film or paper is then transferred to a digital medium. Most of the time, this operation is carried out using a scanner which creates a mirror image of the original document, in black and white or in colour.
When it comes to document management, the objective of digitisation is to preserve and protect documents against the risks of deterioration from acidity, for example, but also to gain space by filing original documents away and to be able to duplicate them without risk of degradation. Digitisation also facilitates public access to old or rare documents.
Digitisation is not document conversion
Be careful not to confuse digitisation with another great but often misused term: document conversion. The latter consists of replacing paper documents with digital files or creating them directly in a digital format using an information system.
For Infogreffe, the purpose of document conversion is “to process in a fully electronic way the data or business documents (correspondence, contracts, invoices, brochures, technical content, administrative documents) that transit within companies and/or externally when dealing with partners (administrations, customers, suppliers)”. From now on, you won’t have any excuse for getting your wires crossed!
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