Although typing is labor-intensive, it is often the most economical method to get large amounts of printed material into a computer. You can either have your staff re-key the text or you can contract with a service bureau. Typists enter the text directly into the system from the printed material.
There are a number of companies offering such a service. These companies generally claim 99.9% or higher accuracy through the use of double or triple key verification (also called double or triple blind typing). This means that they have two or three people type the same material, and then use a computer program to spot differences. The assumption is that several people won't make the same mistake at the same place in the file.
The cost of this service typically varies with the volume and complexity of the original material and the accuracy, turn-around speed, and extra services (such as format tagging) provided by the service company.
The following table lists some of the benefits and drawbacks associated with re-keying the text.
| Benefits | Drawbacks |
| Re-keying printed documents is an established type of service, and you can reliably estimate the costs and time associated with such a project. | Re-keying usually takes longer than scanning. |
| The typists can include formatting and structural information into the text as they re-key it. This can reduce the time necessary to prepare the text for the retrieval software. | A labor intensive job such as this can become costly. (However, the cost of verifying scanned data is also high.) |
| You still must schedule time for proofreading and correction. |