Legally scanning my documents

Lum

I work for a company that sells document scanning hardware and software to the police for use in criminal trials. I don't get involved in the contractual or legal side of things. I just install and support the software itself.

I have been told to use TIFF for everything, and if the document is a B&W (1bit) image then specifically to use a TIFF with Group4 compression.

There are also a whole other bunch of requirements, largely to do with access, storage, permissions and tamper-proofing of the data which will be pretty hard to satisfy in a home-user environment, but the standard of evidence needed in a criminal trial is much higher than in a civil case.

One advantage of this job is I work from home and I have a nice high speed double sided scanner with a 50 page document feeder sat on my desk for test/development purposes. I don't scan all my documents, but anything I'm posting out (especially to the likes of the DVLA) gets scanned before posting and stored in the same software we sell to the police. It's enough to scare the civil servant on the other end of the phone if they're disputing that my copy is genuine.

DCFC79

I wouldnt bother scaning the docs, it would take ages to do, if you do internet banking then you can easily print off the statements if need be

superscaper

Lum wrote: »

I have been told to use TIFF for everything, and if the document is a B&W (1bit) image then specifically to use a TIFF with Group4 compression.

I disagree. I started off scanning my documents a while ago as TIFFs but it starts taking up an awful lot of space compared to PDFs which are much more manageable, much smaller and just as readable.

superscaper

DCFC79 wrote: »

I wouldnt bother scaning the docs, it would take ages to do, if you do internet banking then you can easily print off the statements if need be

Depends on how you're doing it. I spent a couple of hours in one day and scanned every single bank and card statement since I first had a credit card and bank account. Internet banking is of no use document wise before you started internet banking. I no longer even get paper bank statements sent but that didn't get rid of the stack of paper statements I already had and there's no other easily accesible record of those statements.

Lum

superscaper wrote: »

I disagree. I started off scanning my documents a while ago as TIFFs but it starts taking up an awful lot of space compared to PDFs which are much more manageable, much smaller and just as readable.

TIFF supports a variety of compression schemes (including JPEG, ironically enough) did you enable any of them?

Unless you are running OCR on your scans to convert the text part of the image into actual machine-readable text, chances are your PDF just contains a bunch of compressed TIFF files anyway.

If you are running OCR then it definitely won't be admissible, even the best OCR systems are only seeing about 90-95% accuracy.

superscaper

Lum wrote: »

If you are running OCR then it definitely won't be admissible, even the best OCR systems are only seeing about 90-95% accuracy.

That's assuming you're then stripping out the OCR'ed text. Most people wouldn't do that and only OCR the existing images to make them searchable. Whether or not the OCR is accurate makes no odds since the original image is human readable.

Lum

superscaper wrote: »

That's assuming you're then stripping out the OCR'ed text. Most people wouldn't do that and only OCR the existing images to make them searchable. Whether or not the OCR is accurate makes no odds since the original image is human readable.

But if you're doing that you're not going to see a file size reduction.

superscaper

Lum wrote: »

But if you're doing that you're not going to see a file size reduction.

For best compression and quality I found PDF much smaller than TIFF. That's all I'm saying. Certainly much easier to deal with IME in general anyway.

Lum

Likewise, I'm just stating what I have to set it up to use in order to achieve legal admissibility in a criminal court.

For civil courts I have no idea what the requirements are, we don't really deal with that market and even if we did we'd just do it the same as we do for the police, no harm in exceeding the requirements, right?

superscaper

Lum wrote: »

Likewise, I'm just stating what I have to set it up to use in order to achieve legal admissibility in a criminal court.

For civil courts I have no idea what the requirements are, we don't really deal with that market and even if we did we'd just do it the same as we do for the police, no harm in exceeding the requirements, right?

Of course not which is why I'd originally started using TIFF as it was the "rawest" format I could think to use but in the end home use practicality won out and I switched to PDF. Although saying that, at work we use PDFs as well not TIFFs. I guess it depends more on company policy that it does on what's "legally acceptable". For civil courts I think it just needs to be considered reliable and I think readable scans no matter the format is good enough.

As for criminal courts it seems to be more about the document control and procedures in place rather than the actual end file format.