Facility managers need to retain a large amount of information about their buildings, land and facilities. While some of the information is digital many of the building plans are on large paper drawings. Need to easily access and share these large format drawings becomes a challenge. A federal government client turned to ARDEM for its large format document scanning needs. Architectural drawings, facility plans, large maps covering numerous facilities across the country needed to be scanned. Many of the paper drawings went back five or more decades and were on Mylar and blueprints. Some maps were in color showing different topography.
Some drawings were fragile and brittle with age.
ARDEM’s large format document scanning services team arranged for pickup of the boxes of drawings and brought them to their document scanning facility in Hillsborough, New Jersey. Drawing documents were unrolled and prepared for scanning. Some needed to be placed in protective plastic sleeves before scanning so legacy drawing documents would not be damaged during scanning. Scanning was optimized based on the source document being scanned; some drawings were scanned to grayscale, others to color and still others produced best image using bi-tonal scan image.
ARDEM scanned topographic maps, boundary surveys, cadastral surveys, elevation or floodplain surveys and architectural floor plans, site plans, construction drawings and security schematics. The digital images of these large format drawings and maps were scanned at a high resolution and toPDFformat and the digital files were indexed according to the client’s specifications. Now the indexed scanned drawings could be easily retrieved at the client’s facility and shared with their vendor or tenants as necessary.
This project was completed within eight weeks and the original maps and drawings were returned to client while the scanned documents were uploaded to a server and transmitted electronically.
This scan conversion project helped to reduce storage cost, retrieval cost and provided a disaster recovery backup for all the facility and architectural drawing documentation.