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	Scanned Documents - Legal Admissibility


	Question


	Answer


	Are scanned document images acceptable to courts of Law, VAT, Inland Revenue?


	If you have implemented the British standard 10008:2008 ( evidential weight and legal admissibility of electronic information ) - then the answer is YES.


	Will BS 10008 ensure acceptability

	What is BS 10008

	Will Pagefree ensure that we comply with the standard

	Are there other organisations to be considered


Whilst following BS 10008 will ensure that the documents have the greatest probability of being accepted it is no guarantee. Often even the original paper documents will be challenged and their authenticity only established after lengthy investigation

	This recent standard includes the three parts of the code of practice widely know as BIP 0008-1, BIP 0008-2 and BIP 0008-3 which were originally published in 1999 as PD008:1999.

	Whilst all the procedures used by Pagefree are in line with the recommendations of BS 10008 the responsibility goes much further than this. The requirement for compliance starts from the moment that the original document is generated and it is therefore necessary for for the client to ensure that they are complying with the requirements both before and after the documents are collected for scanning.

It is always advisable to confirm with any one who may have an interest in your documents that there is no problem in disposing of the paper based originals. This should include your VAT inspector, Inland Revenue, Solicitor and any professional body who govern or regulate the activities of your particular type of business.

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	Scanning to PDF

PDF ( Portable Document Format ) introduced by adobe is a universal document storage format. Images can be viewed with the Adobe Acrobat viewer which can be downloaded free of charge from their web site. The format gives several advantages over the others in common use. These advantages include:

Compact file size with all formats, fonts, layouts and styles preserved.

What You See Is What You Get ( WYSIWIG ) documents can viewed as exact images

Independent of hardware, software or operating system i.e. Windows, Unix or Mac

This format is highly suitable for - PDF e-books, Legal, Technical and Reference Documents.

Pagefree offer the service to scan to PDF format or for those clients who already have scanned images in other formats we can provide a conversion service.


Types of PDF

	There are three types of PDF document - They are:

		Formatted Text & Graphics

		This type of PDF preseerves the text of a document and a graphic bit map for all non-text items. Where the original document is a scanned image this method necessitates manual correction of the OCR’d ( Optical Character Recognition ) text.

		The main advantage is that the process of conversion is less costly.

		PDF Searchable

		In this format it is possible to view an exact image of the document whilst being able to search the Text produced by OCR. The Text however can not be edited it is for indexing only. There is a low level of manual correction required and so the cost is reduced however because of the retention of full images this format takes up more memory.

		This has to offset against the advantage of having an accurate image of the original which is invaluable where the document may be required in a dispute situation

			Image only

		This is as above but without any OCR produced text for search purposes. This disadvantage can often be minimised by the use of book marks, subject or keyword fields to provide a system of indexing. In some applications this produces a more useful method of searching for individual batches of documents.

	Pagefree staff will be pleased to discuss your document types and recomend a suitable PDF system for their storage and retreival.

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Scanned Documents - Legal Admissibility