Osgoode Hall Law School – York University

Perimeter was contracted by Osgoode Hall Law School at York University to create a digital archive of all their student records dating back to the 1960’s.
This was completed in two phases, pre 1983 and post 1983.
Perimeter provided all logistics for the project including boxing and secure transportation of the files from the University to our secure facility for both phases. The files where indexed by student number, last name, first name and year to a database to provide Osgoode with an accounting of the entire student archives paper record files which could then be compared to the school’s internal student listing to determine how many original files may be lost or misplaced.
Perimeter provided all document preparation services including removal of photographs, all student support documents and transcripts from the files in preparation for scanning. The documents were scanned at 200 dpi grey scale to ensure that all data on the original documents was captured to the electronic file and all images were rotated to proper orientation (portrait or landscape), blank pages removed and image levels adjusted to ensure quality images of all documents. The final deliverable file format were industry standard Adobe PDF files with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to make the
machine text in the documents searchable (live data) which could then be mined by the university when required using Adobe Acrobat Reader, Standard or the School’s choice the full Adobe Acrobat Professional.
The PDF files where then compressed to reduce drive space and make the files manageable while retaining high quality images. One area of concern for Osgoode due to the age of the archive was misfiled documents which in paper format once lost in the archive stayed lost. They were now able to search on a particular student record, find that record but also search the archive for any potential misfiled documents to refile in the proper location.
The archive of data was loaded in to the York University Student Information System and is now available across Osgoode and York as required by authorized individuals from their desktops instead of the prior existing lower level physical archive.
Osgoode is also now able to drastically reduce the time it takes to respond to student or former student requests for information from their files and they are able to respond very quickly now with certified copies of transcripts to the student or their prospective employers with significant time and cost savings to Osgoode.
Perimeter has an ongoing contract with Osgoode to digitize each years student records once a year and add to the archive.
Osgoode has now protected vital core data, improved efficiencies and reduced operational costs by converting from a large paper archive to an internal digital warehouse.