Paper usage is still very high these days despite more and more of our everyday tasks shifting to digital means. With the push towards a more sustainable world, many places are trying to reduce their paper usage, and in some cases, go paperless completely. This could seem a daunting task, especially when you have a backlog of paper records going back decades. There are ways to help on your way towards reducing your paper usage, if that is the direction you wish to go.
Going Paperless
Let’s start with the easiest thing: going paperless for all the new records you make.
The easiest thing is to obviously create documents on your computer and save them to hard drives or some form of cloud storage. There you go, you have now gone paperless for all your future records. Pretty easy, wasn’t it?
Doing this does, of course, bring up issues of cybersecurity which you will need to know about. It’s also important to remember that hard drives need to be destroyed at the end of their lives, as this prevents the information from being recovered off of them.
Now, what about your backlog of older paper records that you still need? You can’t just destroy them. What you need to do is have those old records transcribed into digital formats. A doable job of course, but perhaps a bit difficult if you have a mountain of records to get through. There are typically two main methods that you can use to do this: document imaging, and document scanning.
Document imaging involves, as the name suggests, taking images of the various papers and documents you have. You’d want to use a very good camera, with good lighting on the pages so you can read what is on them. The images being digital files can then be stored as you see fit.
Similar to imaging is document scanning, which makes use of a scanner instead of a camera. The end result is essentially the same one way or another, you’ve got a high-quality visualization of your old paper documents.
When all the papers are digitized to your satisfaction, you will need to safely dispose of them somehow. Luckily those kinds of services are easy to come by. One merely has to reach out and make some inquiries. Paper shredding services ensure you are in compliance with state and federal security regulations, and protects your information from theft.
