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Learn how to prepare paper archives for digitization, from gathering and sorting records to removing staples, so scanning goes smoothly.

Every records manager knows the feeling. A filing cabinet, a network drive, or a SharePoint site can grow so crowded with unlabeled files that nobody can confidently say what lives there anymore. Someone eventually must sort through invoices, contracts, personnel files, and correspondence by hand, deciding where each one belongs and how long the organization […]

Every large-scale physical record digitization project lives or dies in the weeks before a single page ever touches a scanner. It’s tempting to treat preparation as the boring part, the thing standing between an organization and the sleek digital repository on the other side. But the projects that come in on budget and produce clean, […]

Ask anyone who handles Freedom of Information Act requests for a living, and they’ll tell you the same thing: The law hasn’t gotten any easier to comply with, but the volume of requests keeps climbing. Agencies are fielding more inquiries than ever. These agencies often have the same staffing levels they had a decade ago. […]

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from watching a talented employee spend an afternoon retyping numbers from a scanned application into a database. It isn’t hard work in the traditional sense, but it quietly drains an organization’s capacity. Every hour spent keying in names, dates, and dollar amounts by hand is an hour […]

When organizations plan a records modernization project, most of the early conversation revolves around scanners, file formats, and timelines. Metadata rarely gets the same attention, and that’s usually a mistake. The tags, fields, and classifications attached to every digitized file are what determine whether a project succeeds or simply moves the same old filing problems […]

The Part of Digitization That Quietly Goes Wrong When organizations launch a digitization project, the conversation almost always starts with scanning. How many pages per day? What resolution? What type of scanner? Those are legitimate questions, but they tend to overshadow a step that determines whether the entire project succeeds or fails: document indexing. You […]

Every organization eventually reaches the moment when leadership realizes the filing cabinets, storage boxes, and off-site vaults are a liability rather than an asset. Making the leap from paper-based records to a fully digitized environment is one of the most consequential operational decisions an organization can make. At Quality Associates, Inc. (QAI), we’ve guided federal […]

Most organizations digitizing their records focus on the obvious: getting documents scanned, choosing the right file format, and meeting NARA deadlines. Metadata is often treated as an afterthought. However, it’s actually what determines whether your digital records management system works at all. Metadata is, at its simplest, information about your documents. It’s the data layer […]

There’s a moment experienced by a lot of organizations right now, somewhere between the third AI vendor demo and the fifth executive briefing, when someone finally asks the uncomfortable question: “What exactly are we going to feed this thing?” It’s the right question. AI tools are only as reliable as the information they’re trained on […]

If you work in or around a government agency, you already know the feeling. Compliance deadlines tend to creep up quietly, then arrive all at once with a feeling of urgency that leaves everyone scrambling. April 24, 2026, is shaping up to be exactly that kind of moment. Under the Department of Justice’s final rule […]

When the System You Counted On Is Gone Consider this: A hospital administrator needs to pull patient records from 1998 to resolve a billing dispute. The records exist (somewhere), but the document archiving system that stored them was decommissioned years ago. It was then migrated to a replacement platform that was itself eventually replaced. Nobody […]