Edmond Scientific wins Air Force Document Digitization and Management Program

FAIRFAX, VA - Following the success of earlier projects with the Air Force, Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) has expanded its role at Tinker Air Force Base with an $8.5 million, multi-year document digitization, conversion, and sustainment program. Upon its completion in 2007, Edmond Scientific will image more than one million pages and captured data, making SGML, XML, and PDF documents viewable over the Internet. The Air Force will use this method to replace the current paper technical manuals.

"The Air Force realized that bookshelves and warehouses full of paper could be reduced to a collection of CD's or a network storing the data. They weighed all of the advantages of electronic verses paper storage and saw the benefits," Tom Jaggers, ESC Oklahoma City Manager, said.

The benefits of an electronic format compared to paper are substantial. First, the cost of maintaining electronic manuals is significantly less than maintaining paper copies. When changes occur, pages do not need to be altered, reprinted at cost, and shipped out. The Air Force can simply update a manual by computer and distribute it electronically. The cost to ship CD's as opposed to thick stacks of paper is also significantly less. In addition, the electronic manuals will allow more standardization of the material, and provide the capability to be accessed remotely around the world.

"The cost of maintaining paper manuals can be very high," Jaggers said. "By converting the manuals to an electronic format, we streamline the process, give the Air Force better control of material, and standardize the document information."

The document digitization idea originated in the mid-80's when the computer age was just beginning. The project began with a joint-services working group that thought electronic storage of data could work better than paper.

The military developed and issued a set of standards for how they wanted the paper converted to an electronic format, and contracted several companies to begin the conversion. Virtually every company involved with converting data received waivers to modify the standards, attempting to fit the standard to the data rather than manipulating the data to fit the standard. Modification of the standards led to the Air Force receiving a large number of manuals converted in a variety of proprietary formats.

"Edmond Scientific investigated the situation and developed a cost-effective solution of converting the manuals using the military standard without modification," Dave Michalko, Project Manager, said.

Edmond Scientific is committed to quality work, and while they are one of the few companies to solely adhere to military standards, they also guarantee documents to be 99.5% accurate after conversion. ESC has a reputation of sending the Air Force high quality material after each manual filters through an extensive QA editing and testing process.

"Our QA process is one of the best of any company out there," Dean Jones, Production Manager, said. "Most companies basically let their customer do the QA, and if the customer finds something wrong, they go back and fix it instead of sending the customer quality material to begin with."

The effort stems from Edmond Scientific's larger document imaging and management business, in which Edmond helps customers convert existing document collections to electronic formats, and implements retrieval and archival solutions to manage the growing collections of data.