I’ve put together this set of best prac­tices for units that are con­sid­er­ing (or are already actively) dig­i­tiz­ing paper records and using the elec­tronic ver­sion in place of the paper orig­i­nal. This is intended to help you make sure that you are scan­ning records at an accept­able level of qual­ity for uni­ver­sity pur­poses. Please address any ques­tions to me (, University Records Manager).

1. The scan must be com­plete (e.g., for a given credit card state­ment, every receipt and miss­ing orig­i­nal receipt form must be included);
2. The scan must be leg­i­ble. Review scans for leg­i­bil­ity peri­od­i­cally as a part of reg­u­larly con­ducted qual­ity con­trol. Con­sid­er­a­tions for leg­i­bil­ity include ensur­ing that:
   1. The scan is not blurred or indistinguishable;
   2. Each indi­vid­ual doc­u­ment is cap­tured com­pletely; and
   3. The result­ing image is not crooked or skewed.
3. The doc­u­ment must be scanned at a res­o­lu­tion that will cap­ture the finest sig­nif­i­cant details of the orig­i­nal, typ­i­cally a min­i­mum res­o­lu­tion of 150 dpi;
4. The scan must be saved in PDF or TIFF for­mat and must not be fur­ther altered; and
5. The scan must be saved in a loca­tion that is known, iden­ti­fi­able, secure, and backed up on a reg­u­lar basis by OIT or by in-unit IT staff. As with paper records, scanned records must be acces­si­ble when needed, and kept in a secure loca­tion to pre­vent acci­den­tal or inten­tional alter­ation or loss.

Please note that these stan­dards are the min­i­mum required and will be accept­able for most non-permanent records. In some instances higher stan­dards may be appro­pri­ate. For exam­ple, if an orig­i­nal doc­u­ment is faded or badly printed, the scan may need to be done at a higher res­o­lu­tion or the image may need manip­u­la­tion to make it leg­i­ble. The ulti­mate goal, in adher­ing to these stan­dards, is to pro­duce repro­duc­tions of the orig­i­nal records that will serve as accept­able sup­port­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion for inter­nal and exter­nal audits, audits by reg­u­la­tory agen­cies, and legal mat­ters. Scans that are not leg­i­ble, com­plete, and secure, yet acces­si­ble to autho­rized peo­ple when nec­es­sary, are not accept­able forms of sup­port­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion. If you have any ques­tions about these guide­lines, please con­tact the uni­ver­sity records man­ager, .