While I was serving as the Iowa Department of Transportation Librarian (2012 to 2016), I had the opportunity to work with Steven Strooh and his staff at Beeline and Blue. We asked Steven to create high quality scans of our collection of 100 year old Iowa Highway Commission Service Bulletins, so that we could add them to our digital archive before the pages deteriorated any further.
Beeline and Blue invited me down to see their process and talk over the project. The staff handled our documents with care and returned them in the same condition as when delivered. The PDF scans of the documents were of excellent quality, despite the yellowing of the paper. The images looked nice as well, despite the challenges of scanning for readable text and viewable images together on glossy paper. The Iowa DOT Library staff tested the scans for optical character recognition (OCR) and had excellent results. Researchers should be able to use the scans provided by Beeline and Blue for historic text mining.
Again, we were well pleased with the results. While I have moved on to another job and state, I would be happy to recommend Beeline and Blue for similar work at the Iowa DOT or other agencies.
