Interaction between paper and electronic documents

Documents today almost always exist in two forms: paper and electronic. Many documents, especially legacy documents start as paper, but are then scanned and recognized. Other documents are started electronically but then printed for easy reading, annotation, or distribution. Some documents are scanned, operated on electronically, then printed. Often machine readable information, e.g. barcodes or RFID tags are added to paper documents to allow association with the electronic document, or with "meta-data" in some database. Sometimes the ability to go back and forth between paper and electronic forms, round-tripping, is important, other times the two forms are fundamentally different.While the end of paper in the offices has been long predicted, actual volume of printed materials continues to rise. Electronic documents have, in fact, greatly increased the use of paper. This panel addresses making paper more useful in an electronic document world, and making electronic databases deal with paper. There are obvious challenges including scanning paper documents and printing electronic ones, but there are additional opportunities including using paper to summarize and access multimedia documents, and using paper to control electronic actions.