Abstract: A document scanning system (10) communicates with a scanner (40) to provide scanning characteristics and scanning coordinates for a scan and to receive a scanned image (FIG. 3) from the scanner. The document scanning system processes scanning requests from an application (20), defines a set of images to be scanned and calculates the scanning characteristics (colour depth, resolution, brightness, contrast) and scanning coordinates from a document set definition comprising one or more image definitions. Each image definition includes an associated set of coordinates and scanning characteristics for the or each image. A configuration file (30) stores the document set definition and the document scanning system comprises a parser module (12) adapted to read the configuration file.