Information

DCS Scanning Services Help FCO with New UK Public Information Service on Treaties

(Mar 2010)

UK Treaties Online (UKTO) is a new public information service on treaties where both public, OGD's and other governments worldwide can go to find out about treaties involving the UK. The new treaties information search will be available on the FCO website from the 28th April 2010.

The UK Treaties Online search uses a database based on FCO official treaty records and means that for the first time, details of the UK's international treaty obligations dating from the 1830s to the present-day will be accessible to web-users and is aimed at everyone with an interest in international law, from legal practitioners to decision-makers, researchers and interested members of the public.

Data Capture Solutions (DCS) have been responsible for the high-quality scanning of treaty documents and users will be able to view the full text of the UK "Treaty Series" Command Papers from 1892 onwards, which will be linked as PDFs to the related treaty records.

Kevin Ingram commented on the project:

“The FCO approached DCS in 2008 as we had done a considerable volume of work with the Home Office and many other Central Government security agencies.

The scanning work involved book scanning of many old bound volumes which we completed on our overhead non-contact book scanners. It is satisfying to see the work we did now becoming part of a publicly available resource for the future.”

DCS operate one of Europe's largest document scanning services. Using sophisticated high speed duplex scanners we have the capacity to scan over 500,000 pages per day into most formats including TIF, PDF, JPG and many more.

Our scanners can handle B+W, colour and any size up to 36" wide plus all scanning work is accomplished using Kofax Capture combined with VRS image enhancement software to guarantee the best quality images from even the worst quality originals.