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Safeguarding Personally Identifiable Information on Microfilm

By BMI Imaging Systems

08/15/2010 Legislative bodies have different definitions of personally identifiable information (PII), but most definitions classify PII as any information about an individual maintained by an organization that can be used either alone or in combination with other information to distinguish an individual’s identity. Examples of PII can include an individual’s name, date of birth, Social Security number (SSN) and driver’s license number.

Highly regulated industries like the nuclear industry continue to implement new technologies and procedures to monitor and regularly remove PII from within their organizations, regardless of the format that it exists. IT infrastructure solutions that include hardware and software commonly address issues like Data Loss Prevention and Data Leakage. While these solutions focus on existing digital assets, PII often exists in formats other than digital, including paper and microfilm. For example, PII intermingled with other records that researchers access on microfilm can create a risky scenario in which PII accidentally or intentionally gets into the wrong hands.

Other industries facing similar compliance requirements provide best practices to safeguard PII on microfilm. County Recorders, for example, are under pressure from state laws that prevent SSNs from public view. Many County Recorders have selected to digitally convert their archive and redact the information during the conversion process. San Luis Obispo County in California, for example, faced a legislative mandate that prevents the public display and printing of information that contains individual SSNs. The County had 2,600 microfilm rolls representing approximately 3,000,000 official record images.

As a result of this legislation, San Luis Obispo County sought a microfilm conversion solution that could redact SSNs from their public-facing official record digital archive yet create a County staff version that left the SSN in view for the staff. In that way, the staff could hold the original copy to conclusively determine if the redacted text was supposed to be redacted.

San Luis Obispo County selected a solution that identified SSNs during the microfilm-to-digital scanning production process. Each digitally converted microfilm roll was processed through an optical character recognition (OCR) engine that was able to identify SSNs by detecting the actual SSN character strings and by using the context that often surrounds SSNs (e.g. Taxpayer Identification Number, Social Security #). Each SSN detected was then manually adjudicated to identify false positives (text falsely identified as a SSN even though it was not).



The public records are available but SSNs are redacted from view.

Additional Microfilm Conversion Considerations: Accuracy and Image Quality

Conversion accuracy is a key consideration when undertaking any microfilm conversion process. Even services that offer 99% conversion accuracy can still result in tens of thousands of missed images during the actual conversion process. Images are lost for a variety of reasons, including poor microfilm quality and QA processes that depend on human intervention. For example, many services dissociate images from the original microfilm roll. When this occurs, one mistake during the indexing process can result in a converted document that will not be found during document searches.

Solutions on the market that digitally convert the entire microfilm roll can provide a virtually fail-safe process to ensure no records are lost during the conversion process. “We found a solution that provided the conversion accuracy that we were looking for because it digitally captured each microfilm roll in its entirety. As a result, we had a visual way to ensure that none of our images were lost during conversion,” states Julie Rodewald, San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder.

Image quality is another important factor when considering the conversion of microfilm records. It is not uncommon to find microfilm archives that are old in which the records on the film are difficult to read. The right microfilm conversion solution can drastically improve the quality of the entire record archive. Solutions with built-in grayscale can make images that were illegible on the microfilm archive readable again once converted to a digital format. Adjustable grayscale, which enables the user to tune the brightness and contrast of an image, can add another level of quality to the digital record archive.

As nuclear organizations continue to implement solutions to safeguard PII within their organization, microfilm archives need to be considered as part of the overall information pool. Lessons from other agencies like County Recorders demonstrate that the best way to remove PII from microfilm records is to digitally convert the records. Solutions on the market exist that redact the information during the conversion process and also provide users of the archive the flexibility to highlight and block out content directly from the user interface. As organizations evaluate microfilm conversion solutions, conversion accuracy and image quality should be taken into account because conversions like this are only completed once. Ensuring that virtually all records are converted at the highest possible quality guarantees a record archive that is easy to use and manage moving forward.


Brad Penfold works for BMI Imaging Systems (www.bmiimaging.com). BMI Imaging Systems is based in Northern California and has provided document, microfilm, microfiche and aperture card conversion services to commercial and government agencies since 1958. Products include EMC, Canon/Kodak and the Digital ReeL microfilm/microfiche conversion solution.




About This Author

BMI Imaging Systems

Trust BMI Imaging with your document imaging and document management requirements. We treat each and every document as unique, which is the standard that has drawn thousands of companies and government agencies to us to assist them with large-scale document imaging and microfilm conversion projects…

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