The power of imaging

Imaging is rapidly gaining usage across businesses and institutions because of its special technology which allows huge numbers of words, pictures and other illustrations to be reduced to a tiny fraction of the space needed to store originals. The emergence of imaging is being seen in numerous and varied applications around the world. Some of them chronicled in the article are: — Images on billions of pieces of paper are being transformed to image systems at the US National Archives. There, documents are stored in less than 0.5% of the space required on paper. — Businesses in the United States have an estimated 324 billion paper documents stored — 95% of business information is stored on paper. Corporations are seeking ways to apply imaging systems to this problem. The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) estimates that the market for imaging systems will be $6.8 billion by 1993. — Imaging technology is established to enable users to use a kind of electronic shorthand to reduce such illustrations as engineering drawings from 8 Mb to 300 kb — thus enhancing ability to transmit and share such drawings at remote sites. — Banks have a massive need to use imaging systems to process checks, now a time‐consuming and expensive task. Since all of this work is now done by humans, use of imaging eliminates the repetitive and boring aspect of the work. — Electronic filing systems can retrieve file folders in a matter of seconds. Ordinary file folders require manual handling and misfiling is a problem. Insurance claims processing requires massive amounts of paperwork and storage. With imaging systems, these claims can be electronically processed and available to remote users. — Companies such as American Express, American Airlines and American Hospital Corporation all are using imaging systems to gain competitive advantage in dealing with their enormous loads of paperwork.