Hi,

Our legal department has come back with a response, which basically says its
fine as long as we have procedure documents in place which indicate it is
part of the normal course of business.

Thanks to everyone who respond!

J


-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Mennegar, Greg
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2004 12:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Adding Bar Codes to scanning process


I don't think I saw anyone address the real question - "we are concerned
that we are altering the original document and we are unsure how this would
be viewed in the courts."  The 'bates stamping' (either electronic or
endorsed on the document by the scanner) that some people mentioned is
primarily used in litigation support cases, so that 'alteration' of the
document is widely accepted.  Many counties in our state put bar codes
(either stamped or stickers) directly on recorded land transactions, and I'm
not aware of any legal challenges to that.



The safest thing would be to print the bar codes on a blank piece of paper.
You'll get very good recognition and your time and costs will be similar to
applying labels.



As far as other methods of capturing index data, a lot depends on what the
"standard metadata" is.  If the metadata information is sequential, most
indexing software will allow you to auto-increment fields so that there
would be no need for bates stamping, bar codes, etc.  If it's in random
order, and the 'metadata' appears in the same location on every document,
"zonal" OCR might be a better solution.  If the 'metadata' is already
available in an existing database, that can be used to generate bar codes,
or to populate fields in the retrieval program's database.



Greg Mennegar

Office of Secretary of State

Washington State Archives

Imaging and Preservation Services

Manager

711 Tumwater Boulevard SW

MS 40240

Olympia, WA  98504-0240

PH:  (360) 586-2487

FAX: (360) 586-9602

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http://www.secstate.wa.gov/archives/imaging.aspx
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