Book Scanning and Newspaper Digitizing

Yes, with the right handling. Newsprint yellows and grows brittle because of the paper itself, so it never goes near an automatic feeder. Fragile sheets are captured on a flatbed, and oversize broadsheets that will not fit go through our wide-format equipment or are captured overhead.

Clippings mounted in a scrapbook are handled without being peeled off the page. If a sheet is already torn or crumbling at the folds, we will show you what came through and let you decide before continuing. Digitizing is often the last chance to save a clipping run, since the paper keeps deteriorating no matter how carefully it is stored.

Printed text usually is. OCR runs across the captured pages, and clean typeset material from a book or newspaper generally yields solid full-text search, which is what turns a hundred-year run into something you can actually research. Ornate display type, heavy foxing, and tight gutters lower accuracy on individual pages.

Handwritten entries, common in ledgers and church registers, will not OCR reliably. In those cases we index at the volume, section, or date level so a researcher can jump to the right span of pages and read from there. Tell us how people will search the material and the index gets built around that.

As open standard PDF, TIFF, or JPEG, on the media you prefer, with each volume kept as its own file or split by chapter, issue, or year if that is more useful. Nothing requires a special viewer, which matters for material a historical society or alumni group will hand around for decades.

Archival projects usually take a high-resolution TIFF master plus a lighter PDF for everyday reading and sharing, and we are glad to deliver both. Originals come back to you when the project is done. Records Reduction is locally owned and has been doing this work in Matthews since 1998, so the volumes stay in the Carolinas.