State Department of Transportation converts all decades-old highway and bridge construction documents

Services

• Document scanning
• Metadata processing

Situation Overview

The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) maintains a highway network of 9,144 miles, with 28 billion motor vehicle miles traveled per year. During the 1940s Eisenhower administrations, all structural work on roads and bridges had to be documented.

Through the years, CDOT had accumulated over 2 million images of 8869 bridges in Denver on 1800 reels of film, and it was becoming challenging to find structural records.

Biden's administration plans to invest in infrastructure projects soon; all highway and bridge construction documents needed to be transformed into digital retrieval formats.

Our Solution

The project required an agency that could turn around documents quickly and understand the sensitive nature of the documents, which meant that security was a high priority. As a result, they turned to MSI because of its experience and knowledge and because our team has extensive experience with government agencies.

The microfilm digitization team, which has top security clearance, collected the reels from 5 CDOT regional locations using uniformed vehicles, sorted them, and digitized them. The files were converted in PDF/A (ISO standardized version of the PDF format) and delivered via secure FTP transfer for the CDOT’s easy access to documents.

MSI also applied GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping metadata to each map document with their longitude and latitude data so staff can locate structures quickly down to inches. All the attributes required for structural and civil engineers to perform repairs and maintenance and inspection of roads and structures were applied to each document, including author, coordinate system, and scale.