Digitizing Records: Standards, Quality, and Disposing of Originals

Digitization promises a lot: better access, less physical storage, and legacy records brought into the same managed environment as born-digital ones. But a scan is only as useful as it is trustworthy. Turning paper into reliable digital records takes more than a scanner — it takes standards.

Quality is the foundation

A digitized record has to be a faithful, legible, complete surrogate for the original. That means decisions about:

• Resolution and color appropriate to the source material
• File formats suitable for long-term preservation, not just convenience
• Quality control to confirm every page was captured, legibly and in order
• Metadata so the digital record is identifiable and findable

The federal FADGI guidelines provide widely used technical benchmarks for digitization quality, and NARA has issued standards agencies must meet when digitizing records — especially permanent records destined for the National Archives.

Metadata makes it a record

An image file alone is not a managed record. To function as one, it needs metadata establishing what it is, when it was digitized, and how it fits the retention schedule. Without that context, a scan is just a picture — hard to find, hard to trust, and hard to dispose of properly.

Disposing of the source records

The payoff of digitization — reclaiming space — usually depends on being able to dispose of the paper originals afterward. This is allowed, but only under conditions: the digital version must meet the required quality and metadata standards, and the disposal of the originals must be authorized by an applicable retention schedule. NARA’s rules permit agencies to digitize and then dispose of source records, including permanent records, when the digitization meets its standards.

Digitizing without a documented plan for the originals is a common and costly mistake: the organization ends up maintaining both the paper and the digital copies, doubling its holdings instead of consolidating them.

Plan before you scan

Successful digitization projects start with the end in mind — quality targets, metadata requirements, and the disposition authority for the originals all defined up front. Done right, digitization is one of the highest-value moves in records management. Explore the digitization and imaging hub for more.