Mr. Schiff: Files at the FBI are going from paper to computer. And it happens in the FBI's Document Conversion Lab...

Ms. Makara: "Doc Lab converts the paper records into electronic images ."

Mr. Schiff: That's Cathy Makara of the FBI's Records Management Division. She says the images can be put into several formats...

Ms. Makara: "We can convert them into various formats such as pdf, tif files, whatever the customer wants, we convert them into it."

Mr. Schiff: Makara says this is not only good for citizens, but for FBI employees searching files...

Ms. Makara: "We convert the paper records into digital images by first scanning the images into the computer and then saving them in these formats. After the images are scanned into the computer, we then can convert them into a file, a text file, which makes them searchable."

Mr. Schiff: More than 9,000,000 paper files have been computerized since the Document Conversion Lab was created in 2002. I'm Neal Schiff and that's what's happening at the "FBI, This Week."

Link: "FBI, This Week" ABC Radio Show Archives