SCANFAX: HMSO's EC document delivery service
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045097 |
| Date | 01 June 1991 |
| Pages | 335-336 |
| Published date | 01 June 1991 |
| Author | Peter Raggett |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
SCANFAX: HMSO's EC
document delivery service
Peter Raggett
HMSO Publications
Centre,
51 Nine Elms
Lane,
London SW8 5DR,UK
HMSO is the government agency responsible for providing a
number of services for publicly-funded bodies in the UK and
has a turnover in excess of £360 million per
annum.
The pub-
lishing and book distribution division arm of HMSO trades
under the name of HMSO Books. Books are published for
public-funded bodies in both central or local government and
educational institutions. They are distributed from HMSO's
Publications Centre, located in South London.
As well as publishing in its own right, HMSO Books is the
sales and distribution agent
in
the UK for several international
organisations, including the European Community (EC).
There are a number of methods available for ordering pub-
lications from HMSO: by post, telephone, fax, electronically
through a dedicated link or by Teleordering. The postal and
telephone orders generate some 1500 pieces of paper a day
and it was to overcome this storage problem that HMSO in-
itially considered document image processing (DIP) in 1988.
A second potential application was the faxing of pages of EC
material to customers, which is how SCANFAX was born.
1.
The system
After the operational requirement had been issued a number
of companies presented proposals and held system demon-
strations. The contract was finally awarded to System 2100,
based in Amersham, UK. The system consists of five net-
worked 80386 PCs configured as:
Network server
Fax server
2 x Scan stations
Retrieval stations.
The network server holds the index to the images on a 330
megabyte magnetic disk. The images themselves are held on
5¼" WORM (Write Once Read Many) optical discs. The
scanning and retrieval stations are fitted with A3 monitors.
The unusual element in the configuration is the fax server.
This has been installed to deal solely with EC document sup-
ply service.
2.
Scanned material
Each day the optical disc section of HMSO receives two
copies of the L, C and S series of
the
EC Official Journal and
any COMDOCs that are published. The Official Journals
contain EC legislation, reports from the Court of Justice and
in-vitations to tender for public works contracts and for the
supply of commodities to countries within the European
Community. COMDOCs are the working documents of the
European Commission.
3.
Operation
3.1.
Scanning
Two copies of each publication to be scanned are received
each day in the optical disc section. The two copies are
merged so that a single sided copier can scan each page with-
out the operator having to turn the page over. The complete
publication can then be fed as a batch through the automatic
document feeder.
The pages are digitally scanned and bit-mapped. Bit-map-
ping involves the conversion of
an
image into blocks of white
and black dots — in the case of the EC journals the image is
scanned at 300 dots per inch (dpi). The bit image is com-
pressed to fax group 4 standard, which significantly reduces
the size of each page image.
Images are first written to a temporary storage medium on
the 330 megabyte magnetic disk located on the file server.
Overnight the images are copied from the hard disk onto a
5¼" WORM optical disc. Each 600 megabyte WORM holds
about
20
000 A4 images on
its
two
sides.
A backup copy of the
day's images is written to a second optical disc before the
images on the magnetic disk are erased.
3.2. Retrieval
To retrieve a document the operator first goes into the index
database for EC documents and can enter the ISBN or the
document number. From the contents pages the operator se-
lects the relevant pages which have been requested by the
customer. The images for those pages are retrieved from the
optical disc and written to a special 'tag' file.
A
cover sheet is
then prepared with the details of
the
customer's
name,
address
and fax number. Messages can also be printed on the cover
sheet. The tag file is carried across the network onto the fax
server; the system automatically dials the customer's fax
number and transmits the images over the telephone lines to
be received on the customer's fax machine. For customers
without a fax machine the pages are printed out on a laser
printer and despatched by post.
The Electronic Library, Vol. 9, No. 6, December
1991
335
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