How to Create a Searchable Digital Library with Foxit

It’s not unusual for businesses to accumulate thousands, even tens of thousands, of hard-copy documents over the years. But storing that many items is a nuisance—and it can be expensive. So, it pays to make all those documents digital and store them in the cloud or on a server, ready to be referenced whenever and wherever you need them.

What’s more, it pays to make those hard-copy documents searchable so that anyone in your organization can easily search for and find the valuable content they contain.

Lastly, digitizing hard-copy books, documents and reports means you’ve safeguarded that information in the event that a catastrophe such as fire or flood destroys the original paper formats.

How to backup physical documents digitally

The most secure yet easiest-to-access option is to create a digital copy of the records. This allows you to retrieve your information quickly and easily.

A good way to back up your physical documents digitally is to scan them into digital PDF format, then make them searchable via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Then you can store your documents on an external hard drive, local server or in the cloud so that they can then be accessed remotely.

Of course, if your business has thousands of hard-copy resources like books, research papers and contracts, you need a robust solution.

Turn to PDF Editor and/or PDF Compressor

When you’re looking at document-to-PDF conversion, compression, and optimization for scanned documents, Foxit PDF Editor and/or PDF Compressor provides a fast, flexible solution.

For smaller amounts of paper that will be scanned in my hand, Foxit PDF Editor can convert scanned images to PDF and then OCR them so they are searchable, editable, exportable, and cut-and-paste-able.

For large amounts of conversions, PDF Compressor is a server solution that provides businesses with automated, high-volume document-to-PDF conversion, compression, and optimization, PDF Compressor works for both image documents and born-digital files.   While it provides 100% accurate born-digital to PDF conversion, it also offers faster document conversion with unattended processing and touchless automation features.  Plus, its integrated OCR technology allows full text searching for all scanned documents converted to PDF and PDF/A files.

Use PDF IFilter Server to index large amounts of PDF documents fast

Foxit PDF IFilter provides super-fast indexing, even for a huge number of PDF documents, and then lets you quickly find desired documents by specifying search criteria. Built on Microsoft’s IFilter indexing interface, Foxit PDF IFilter extracts data from PDF documents and returns the index results to search engine software.

It indexes PDF content, titles, subjects, authors, keywords, PDF portfolios, annotations, text and data from forms (both standard PDF and XFA forms), bookmarks, attachments, create time/date, number of pages, and the names of the creating applications. This gives you more accurate search results.

Best of all, Foxit PDF IFilter can handle virtually any type of PDF document—files, email attachments, and even annotations.

While converting your physical text documents and resources into searchable digital PDF file format may seem somewhat daunting, it’s impressively achievable with the modern software solutions that Foxit provides. And the gain in information access you provide your team members can be invaluable.