Founded in the late 19th century, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) is the most applied-to university in the United States, annually receiving more than 100,000 applications from would-be undergraduate students. Yet in recent years, it has been the school's highly sought-after Ph.D. programs that have been a source of considerable document generation — and a repository of trapped potentially valuable data and information.
Since the school's inception, each of its thousands of doctoral candidates has been required to submit a thesis report to complete their respective programs and graduate. These thick paper documents, which average around 200 pages each, have been kept in boxes and stored under the UCLA library basement, where most have sat, not accessed since the time of their storage. Given the vast corpus of top-tier research that has taken place in UCLA's graduate schools over the years, these boxes represent significant amounts of possibly useful and even groundbreaking documentation in multiple fields.
Realizing this, UCLA engaged Ripcord to help them go digital.
Below we've outlined the top three ways Ripcord helped UCLA unlock the information in these mountains of stored papers.
Using its proprietary robots, machine learning, and optical character recognition, Ripcord digitized thousands of boxes of thesis papers from four university departments. Ripcord scanned, classified, and extracted the text in the documents, and made it all available for search and retrieval in its cloud-based platform, Canopy. Now volumes of documents — many of which have not been touched by human hands in decades, if not a century or more — are online in a secure instance, ready to be pulled up with sub-second keyword, boolean, and filtered searches.
Many of the documents stored under the UCLA library were fragile, given their age, and on their way to disintegration. Had they been allowed to turn to dust without first being digitized, the information on their pages would have been lost forever. Scanning and enriching them with Ripcord solutions means they and any key findings they contain will be retained for posterity.
Who knows what long-standing problems might be solved in coming years owing to the preservation of these documents?
The boxes, shelving, and other containers housing the old theses took up huge amounts of storage space. The files had to be maintained in a temperature and moisture-controlled environment. This physical storage cost the university money and led to higher energy consumption, as increased clutter meant heating and cooling systems had to work harder. Relieving the school of these bulky files freed up large areas for additional storage.
Learn how UCLA benefits from Ripcord's solution by downloading the case study.
Is your organization ready to unlock the potential in your old paper files? Contact Ripcord. We're on a mission to digitize the world, industry by industry. With our proprietary vision-guided robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technology, Ripcord solutions digitize, enrich, and organize an entity's most important paper documentation, no matter the volume.
We'll save your company time and money and free up your employees for more of the work they really want to do.