This is our specialty. We have delicately handled and hand scanned countless priceless documents.

About our Archival Scanning Services

Everybody will tell you that they have the ability to scan fragile originals. But most likely the don’t have the experience. We do. For over a decade, we’ve scanned everything from items from the last remaining collection of the New York Public Library, to shipping manifests from the late 1800’s

Client Archival Scanning Case Study – NAMM & MBSI

Spanning two fiscal years, we completed a large archival scanning project for the National Association of Music Manufacturers (NAMM) as well as for the Music Box Society International (MBSI). Both of these projects were scanning their trade publications, which ranged from the late eighteen hundreds into the twentieth century, many of which were the last known intact copies previously from the New York Public Library’s collection.

For this project – these pages were tabloid ~11 x 17 — we scanned everything in high resolution color, and then delivered these TIF Masters at 400DPI along with 300DPI PDF files which had been OCR’ed for easy file searching – we use only the highest quality commercial scanners and OCR technology.

The value of the ability to search the archive was evident upon the delivery of our first batch of file back to the organization. Soon after delivery, the NAMM’s librarian / historian, Dan, wrote us back to express how extremely happy they were to learn that a member was able to pinpoint a release date for a particular piece of equipment at a time earlier than was thought because the ability to search through these previously unsearchable archive. An excerpt from that email is below:

…the show was not a great success for Fender in those early days, and as a result, Mr. Bacon could not find any meaningful data. We were able to run a keyword search using the spotlight search function on ELVIS-Apple allowing us to search the entire ScanGo holdings simultaneously for terms such as Fender with incredible accuracy. The ScanGo holdings include the entire collection of Music Trade Reviews from 1887 through the 1960s in which we had scanned by the company in Denver (ScanGO) last year. It was awesome to witness technology running a fast search on materials that, just a year ago, were not indexed and sitting in boxes! Mr. Bacon was delighted with our findings! His story is just one example of how important it is to preserve these documents and share them with those who care the most, our members. If this was baseball, we would be Babe Ruth!
– NAMM’s Librarian / Historian

Client Archival Scanning Case Study – Chinese in Cuba – Arizona State University Haden Library / Private Collector

Over the course of several years, we worked with Arizona State University to scan and digitize the unique and physically delicate trade records between China and Cuba dating from the late 1800’s. These over a century old documents ranged from very small to oversized pieces of extremely fragile documents, many of which were bound. Utilizing a variety of technologies, including our proprietary scanners with the ScanGo™ dynamic pressure conforming cradles, our high resolution electronic scans of this private collection have been used for both print and digitial reproductions for academic presentations in the United States and China.

The project proved a great success and in 2016 ScanGo was named the preferred archival scanning provider for the Arizona State University Library System.