Documents -

In essence, my work is to find and make copies of records responsive to the client's query. Sometimes the client has a particular document in mind, but more often he or she is looking for specific or general references to a given subject over a given time period.  In many cases responsive documents are found scattered within the records of various US government entities.

While I am searching through records, I can use a smart phone camera to photograph and email them to the client in real time.  These photographs are not designed to be used as a final product; rather they can be used to vector in on the responsive records.

Responsive records are either photographed with a high-resolution camera or scanned with a flatbed scanner. These are then converted into easy to print text-searchable PDF* files. While making the PDF files, I often also publish a website containing the same images to a hidden Internet address.  In this way the client can look at the material on a nightly basis.  For more details, click here.

Final Product as a CD or DVD. Clients usually request that digitized records come to them in the form of  PDF files burned to a CD or DVD or place on a drive.  In those cases where the client needs the record rapidly, it can be transferred over the Internet.

Rates:

I charge competitive rates of around $290.00 per day depending upon duration and complexity of search and final product. All copying media, such as photocopies, flash or other hard drives, CDs and DVDs are paid for by the client.

* Note:  Searchable text-recognized PDF files are created after the image has been converted into a PDF file using an OCR (optical character recognition) program.  Such files are searchable by many search engines, such as Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search or the search tool that in included with Adobe Acrobat Reader.  These search tools do not work with handwriting and can be imprecise, especially with old documents written with manual typewriters.