I have a line on a job doing “document coding” via the internet for a reputable company that really actually pays. The contact I got was from a friend of a friend, and I’m curious as to what, exactly, document coding is?
Here are some links if it helps:
http://www.ikon.com/services/lds/document_coding.asp
http://www.indatacorp.com/services/coding.asp
http://www.doar.com/litigation/coding/index.asp
They all talk about document coding, but not exactly what it is. Any ideas?
Not real sure, but this seems to be a method of scanning hard-copy documents into documents stored on a computer. But one step beyond that, they categorize and index the document’s information so you can search through related information from all the documents you have scanned (stored in your database).
I’ve done both offline and online coding. It’s not exactly a thrilling occupation. If you hate to read, keep looking for a way to make money.
Offline coding involves scanning (reading, not OCR) a document and tagging whatever the legal beagles want tagged with code numbers. The project I was on required us to code (in the case of emails) sender, recipients, subject, date and any use of particular terms or names as well as the previously-assigned document number. We also coded a lot of technical drawings, manuals and circuit schematics. Once us (relatively) high-paid coders tagged everything, it was shipped overseas to what must have been very low-paid, but fast typists who’d re-type the whole damned email into a database, which was then zapped back to the attorneys. I was led to believe that this was faster, cheaper and more reliable than OCR scanning. Five years ago, it may have been so.
Online coding works much the same way, but you’re working off already-scanned and OCR’d items. Much like you’d double-click a word in a word processor to highlight it, we’d grab the desired words and whatnot and with a right-click flyout menu, identify what it was.
I can’t remember the actual coding software system we were using, (the name “Summation Blaze” comes to mind) so your experience now may be very similar or wildly different.
Who knows? You may actually learn something. I picked up (and promptly forgot!) a few Portugese phrases and more than I ever intended to know about high-end CAD workstation graphics board memory design.
Hey, thanks for the well thought out reply! I dont’ mind reading at all, and it’s just for extra income, so I’ll see what it’s all about and how it pays. That’s what I thought it was, but I guess I hate to be stupid, but what purpose does it serve for the client? So you have a legal document that has portions coded- is it just for quick lookups in their databases? For example, I code the name portion. Then when they do a search on “Smith” in their documents, they can search that particular category (name) because it’s coded the same as the other name categories. Does that sound right?