Paper and audio in. Searchable records out.
You have the backlog and the retention mandate. What you do not have is the staff, the scanners, or a spare eighteen months. GovIQ and our delivery partners do the work — and the repository we hand back belongs to your agency, in formats you can read without us.
Priced on measured volume after a sample, not on a guess.
Why this matters now
Every serious AI effort in government runs into the same wall: the knowledge that matters is locked in paper, in audio, and in scans with no text layer. A model cannot reason over a filing cabinet.
Digitization is no longer a storage project. It is the prerequisite for everything else your agency wants to do — search, analysis, public records response, and any AI you deploy afterwards. It also gets a floor of your building back.
Three kinds of unstructured record, one job
Paper, audio, and dead PDFs look like different problems. They are the same problem: knowledge your agency legally holds but functionally cannot reach.
Paper
Boxes, folders, bound volumes, microfilm-era printouts, and the filing cabinet nobody has opened since the last administration.
Audio
Recorded 911 and dispatch calls, hearings, and interviews — the records that are technically retained but practically unsearchable.
Files already digital, but not usable
Scanned PDFs with no text layer, image-only TIFFs, and shared drives where the only index is somebody’s memory.
How an engagement actually runs
Scope and sample
We measure the actual backlog — boxes, linear feet, hours of audio, file counts — and run a representative sample before anyone signs anything longer than a pilot.
Pickup under custody
Scheduled movement with a transport manifest and a sealed chain of custody. Every box barcoded and location-tracked from the moment it leaves your building.
Preparation and capture
Preparation is the real labour in this work, and we say so. Then capture to an enforced, provable image profile.
OCR and extraction
A searchable text layer on every page. Identifiers, parties, dates, and amounts proposed by machine — and confirmed by a person before anything is treated as fact.
QC and your acceptance
Technical and visual QC with reason-coded defects, a rescan loop that loses no page, and a batch that publishes only once you accept it.
Publication and handback
Records land in a repository you own and can search. Boxes are reconstructed and returned, custody reconciled with zero unexplained items.
Ask what you own at the end
The standard shape of a records digitization contract is several years of professional services with no hardware line, no software line, and no asset at the end. When the payments stop, the access stops. It is worth naming that before you sign it.
The usual model
- A recurring fee that continues long after the scanning is finished
- Records hosted on a platform you do not control
- Export available in the vendor’s format, on the vendor’s terms
- A renewal conversation every year, with your own records as leverage
How we structure it
- A build plus a support subscription, so the asset is yours
- Deployed inside your boundary, or in a facility you approve
- Open formats: PDF/A, OCR text, metadata as JSON or CSV, checksums, lineage manifests
- A no-charge exit that restores on a machine which has never seen our software
What we will not do with your records
We will not train on them
Your records are never used to train a public model. Not ours, not anybody’s.
We will not let a machine have the last word
OCR and extraction propose. A person confirms. No legal identifier is ever machine-confirmed.
We will not overstate our compliance
Infrastructure follows CJIS-ready practices aligned to NIST SP 800-53. GovIQ does not itself hold FedRAMP, CJIS certification, or SOC 2, and we will not imply that we do.
We will not hold your data hostage
The exit path is a functional requirement of the product, tested like any other, precisely so the promise is literally true.
Start with a sample, not a signature
Tell us roughly what you are holding — boxes, linear feet, hours of audio, or a shared drive nobody can search. We will scope it and run a representative sample so the numbers in any proposal are measured rather than assumed.
Scope your backlog