Putting your old minutes online

A scanned page is only useful online if the file holds real words, not just a picture of the page. How to check a file, how to scan once instead of twice, and where a New York district can look for help paying for it.

Checked on November 3, 2026.

Does this PDF have real text in it?

Open it and try to select one line with your mouse, as you would in an email. If the words highlight one by one, the file has a text layer. If nothing highlights, or the whole page turns blue as one block, it is a picture of the page. A second check: press Ctrl+F and search for a word you can see. If it is not found, it is a picture.

A picture looks fine on screen, so it is easy to miss. Nobody can search inside it, and:

The site is built to WCAG 2.1 AA. But if you upload scanned minutes with no text layer, no website can make them accessible: a screen reader sees a photograph. That is why every document you upload is checked for a text layer, and the ones without one are flagged so you know which to fix. Anyone telling you a website alone makes you compliant hasn't thought about your PDFs.

Scanning once, not twice

  1. Turn on text recognition

    It may be called OCR, Text Recognition or Searchable PDF. On many office copiers, pick "Searchable PDF", not "PDF".

  2. Check the first page

    Select a line, as above, before you scan the rest. Fixing a setting takes a minute; scanning an archive again takes weeks.

  3. 300 DPI, black and white or grayscale

    Below 200 DPI the recognition gets unreliable; above 300 the files only get bigger.

  4. One PDF per meeting

    All of a meeting's pages in one file, both sides if the paper is printed on both.

  5. Name it by the date on the minutes

    2015-06-15-regular-monthly-meeting.pdf. Named that way, our archive import fills in each date for you to check; any other name works, and you type the date. Read the date off the page: a budget hearing is often held the year before its budget.

Text recognition is the first step, not the last: W3C's guidance on scanned PDFs (Technique PDF7) goes on to mark the headings and reading order.

Paying for it, in New York

The New York State Archives' Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund (LGRMIF) makes grants. Its eligibility page says: "Fire districts are eligible to apply for LGRMIF grants because they are local governments." It lists what a district needs in place first: a records management officer, and the Archives' retention schedule adopted. "Document Conversion and Access" is one of its project categories. Amounts and dates change each year: read them on the Archives' LGRMIF page.

If you would rather not scan it yourselves, we can quote for it once we have seen your archive: get in touch.