About G G Baker & Associates

G G Baker & Associates was formed in 1968 to provide impartial advice for those planning information management systems and to assist companies in difficulty with existing projects. Contracts have since been undertaken for many hundreds of enterprises throughout the world.

Having no commercial link with any supplier, Gerald Baker has been in considerable demand as a lecturer and as an independent Chairman for national and international bodies. For many years he headed the Microfilm Association of Great Britain and all of the British Standards Institution committees responsible for micrographics, he also led the UK delegation to meetings of the International Standards Organisation. During that time he was responsible for bringing many British Standards into line with their international counterparts. He initiated and supervised work on the standards for COM film formats, reader image quality and, most importantly, the first advisory standard on the legal admissibility of microforms (which many experts at the time considered to be an impossible task). It was published in 1984, shortly before he left the UK to live in semi-retirement on the island of Mallorca. This pioneering standard provided the foundation for the current advisory standards relating to the legality of scanned documents.

The consultancy soon found that it could not handle the demand for unbiased information on commercially available products and services, so a publishing division was formed to make its knowledge and experience widely available through inexpensive books. The first title was A Guide to COM which first appeared in 1971 when the technology was still in its infancy. This became a standard reference work and over 6000 copies were sold before it was merged into the Micrographics Year Book.

A similar pattern followed with the next publication, A Guide to Microfilm Readers & Reader Printers which ran to six editions before its content, mostly comprising illustrated data sheets, was also merged into the Micrographics Year Book. A third guide, to Microfilm Production Equipment, completed the series and ran to four editions until it too was incorporated into the Micrographics Year Book.

A bi-monthly magazine Microfilm & Video Systems was launched in 1982 to cover micrographics and the then emerging technology of electronic document management. It was an immediate success but it had to be sold in 1986 when all editorial activity moved to Spain. The title reflected the fact that many of the early attempts to record documents electronically were based on video technology because optical discs were still under development at the time.

From 1991 to 1996 G G Baker & Associates published the Document Image Processing Year Book which was  the first UK reference work dedicated to suppliers of electronic document management products and services. By 1996 many other publishers had entered the field and several of their offerings were blatantly based on the DIP Year Book. There was too much pointless duplication of effort and G G Baker & Associates withdrew from the overcrowded market in order to concentrate on the neglected field of micrographics.

For many years the Consultancy arranged exhibitions and seminars and stocked standards and publications from other independent sources such as the National Microfilm Association (now AIIM International) in the USA. This ceased in 1986 when Mr Baker left the UK, taking advantage of modern communication techniques to edit the Micrographics Year Book from offices overlooking the coast of Majorca, but all sales and marketing operations remained in the UK.

An experimental web site, combining tutorials and commercial information relating to UK suppliers of micrographic goods and services was launched in February 2000.  The success of the pilot scheme encouraged the development of a conventional web directory which was very well received by users and suppliers. That site was the original www.ggbaker.com and it was maintained by G G Baker & Associates until it was sold to Genus Ltd in 2005. Genus initially renamed the site the GreenSheet Directory and subsequently the IDMi Directory. During 2009 G G Baker & Associates were invited to buy back the site - for which they had always maintained editorial responsibility - and part of its content was used to create this much larger encyclopedia. The IDMi Directory was then closed .

During more than forty years of publishing G G Baker & Associates have combined authoritative introductory text with a directory of products and services.  This encyclopedia continues that tradition to offer users and potential users of document management in the UK a reliable, impartial and free reference work.