Documents might not be the most fun thing to think about but they are important and they do keep society running at a safe clip. We never think of corporate or government documents as particularly relevant or important things but on a large enough scale these records become incredibly important. They keep track of who we are, what we do, how we lived our lives. Most of human life is spent in the here and now, right in front of you where everything is situated and it is easiest to figure things out. You can’t think about what your grand kids are going to do in sixty years because there are bills to pay right now. This isn’t a bad thing per say, we really couldn’t live any other way but it does occasionally blind us to the realities of our real situations. We can often regret things years later that we didn’t even think about at the time because we just aren’t wired for that sort of long term thought. Humans aren’t tortoises or redwood trees, after all. We don’t live for hundreds of years and so we don’t really think about what the future holds all that often. But the fact remains that the future is just as important as the past and we need to plan for it. Let’s take a slightly more in depth look at this idea and suss out exactly how and why it is important keep and maintain documents for future posterity. By the end of this, hopefully you will understand why documents are so important and the understated, underrated effect they have on keeping human society together on the whole.
At the Beginning
Before document imaging services, before scanning microfilm and digital scanning services and microfilm conversion and microfilm scanning services, before conventional files and folder files and the x ray scanning service, before all of this, there was art. Now we don’t often think of as cave art as being particularly relevant to keeping our documents in line or our history clean and written but it was art, at the beginning, that allowed humans to document their collective lives and actions on a larger scale. Cave art found in France and in other places in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas indicate that humans were avid artists and kept track of their hunts and ceremonies via collages in the places they lived. These aren’t exactly documents as we’d think of them but they are the very first documents that humanity had and kept. This art wasn’t just art for its own sake, either. These cave paintings kept track of important parts of the societies these people lived in and were consulted for information regarding where to move and how to hunt. They really were the precursor to all of the documents we have today.
Document Imaging Services, Then and Now
Document imaging services are not something you typically associate with the past but there have always been ways to uncover and clarify important documents that we need. During the medieval era in Europe, there were special potions and prayers used to maintain different important documents concerning population and governments. The efficacy of these methods might be a little questionable by modern standards but it was what they used at the time. Later on, during the Renaissance and in the Enlightenment, they began to use slightly less ethereal methods of record keeping which began to develop into other fields that included encryption, codes and linguistics. The history of record keeping and document imaging services as a whole is fascinating because it involves so much of trying to keep information consistent and whole for very long periods of time which has never been easy. Nowadays, we have computers and digital services which can store endless amounts of data and keep track of billions of people. It is a system that most people throughout history would dreamed about but it is far from perfect. We will have to continue to be vigilant and careful if we hope to keep our digital documents from being lost to history like so many other artifacts. We, too, are part of history like everyone else.