Australia’s Department of Health and Ageing wants to bring its records from the pre Medicare era into the digital age, in a project that will scan over 40 million records for the period 1 July 1975 to 31 January 1984 presently held on microfiche.

The tender calls for scanning and digitising the microfiche content, as well as optical character recognition (OCR) and conversion to PDF format with both text and manual searching.

The historical data on microfiche is still in use, however the use of microfiche readers to access the data is time consuming and imposes further wear and tear on the microfiche. The department wants the historical data preserved, and its usability improved.

The successful tenderer is expected to complete the project by 30 June 2013.