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 [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> http://www.secstate.wa.gov/archives/imaging.aspx <http://www.secstate.wa.gov/archives/imaging.aspx> List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance