Posts Tagged ‘backfile’

Another Court Takes a Step Toward “Paperless”

Friday, December 11th, 2009
Town of Manheim Court

Town of Manheim Court

It’s been a few years in the making, but a small town court in Herkimer County, NY is finally taking the first step toward achieving a paperless office.

Soon, countless hours of administrative paper-shuffling will be eliminated. The problem of sharing documents requested by federal agencies, and even among their own staff, will be solved. And the 300 square foot room that housed their records will again enjoy the luxury of elbow room. While the project is only slated to digitize about fifteen boxes initially, there are dozens more waiting.

There were recommendations to move the documents to microfilm, a medium which does boast longevity and versatility. A properly stored roll of microfilm can last upwards of 500 years, and no matter how technology changes, in a pinch you could always view microfilm with nothing more than a magnifying glass.

These qualities have driven archivists to opt for film for over 150 years, but even in a warehouse of canisters of rolls, you still need to locate them. While viewing is rather simple, retrieval is still a major stumbling block.

And even within the discussion of longevity, most documents carry a retention period of five to ten years. That kind of makes the shelf-life of microfilm, not to mention the overhead involved in generating and storing it, overkill.

Lock 17 in Little Falls

Lock 17 in Little Falls

The break came this year when the Justice Court Assistance Program (JCAP) grant that the court had been applying for came through. Since 1999, JCAP has been awarding grants of up to $30,000 to town and village courts for purposes ranging from office and security equipment to furniture to courtroom renovations. Many courts in the area have utilized this grant to update their records and put them in a digital format.

Aside from the service of having the boxes scanned, the grant also covers CNG-SAFE, a record retrieval, viewing, and tracking software, and in-house equipment such as document scanners to handle day-forward paper. Once the step is made to get your documents digitized, it’s hard to justify not implementing some process for scanning new documents as they are generated.

If you are interested in back-file document scanning or installing a solution to go paperless, please don’t hesitate to call us.

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Document Preparation

Friday, November 20th, 2009

What does it mean to prepare a document for imaging? If you’re dealing with day-forward scanning, then it’s probably just a matter of removing the staples and rubber bands. But with any degree of back-file scanning, the process is a lot more involved.

Removing the obstructions.

The most important aspect of doc prepping is removing the obstructions. Paper clips, staples, rubber bands, and other unscannable items can wreak havoc on your hardware, so we have to be meticulous in extracting them. While it is an unarguable truth that they must come out, let’s not jump into the process yet. We have to determine what happens when they come out.

All of those things add meaning and structure to your records. A staple might group documents in an application record. A binder clip might group several related applications. So as we remove them, we need to make sure we translate what those items meant to your records.

What humans see is not what computers see.

When we receive a box of documents, there may be anywhere between a few or dozens of files in it. Our physical storage conventions are pretty uniform and recognizable. We might see an accordion folder with manila folders inside. Or we might see binder clips in the folders. You know what all these things mean, but if we remove them hastily, a great deal of meaning is rent from your files.

The way we deal with this is to add pages to your documents that represent those items. We’ll go over your records in great detail before the project starts, and at that point, we’ll make decisions regarding how the boxes will be prepped. You might request that each stapled bunch will become one document with multiple pages. Or perhaps a binder clip with constitute a document. As the metal is taken out, a barcode (called a patch-T) will be inserted. This will tell the document scanner to create a new document.

When we’re finished, you’ll be given electronic files that are meaningful and structurally similar to your paper records. Depending on the files, adding patch-Ts could grow the volume of the box considerably, so care must be taken not to overload a box.

Prepping for indexing.

When it comes time to index your files, our indexers use a software that shows them the first page of a document so they can read the data and input it into the index fields. Sometimes, this data is not always front and center in paper records.

The doc preppers may be given rules regarding how to get that information to where it is easily readable by the indexer. If a manilla folder provides the primary indexing values, that folder might be cut in half and positioned such that the name on the tab is in a visible, predictable location. The back side of the folder is no longer important because the patch-T for the next record will effectively end the previous record. Slowly, we begin to see how our legacy conventions for organization and structure translate into a computer-readable format.

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Breaking into the World of Electronic Documents

Friday, November 20th, 2009

If you’re interested in breaking the tether to your paper records, here are a few ways to get started.

  1. Backfile scanning: E-BizDocs has experience with backfile scanning. We’ve contracted with numerous businesses, departments, and organizations in both the public and private sector to minimize their on-site paper records storage.

    In some cases, we’ve completely eliminated their paper records. Small town courts that have generated a dozen boxes in their tenure now effortlessly browse their documents in CNG-SAFE rather than flipping through drawers and folders.

    In other cases, our customers want to take a portion of the tens-of-thousands of boxes they have and get those into an electronic repository. The Office of Mental Health is an excellent example of this. Scanning that volume of documents can be quite an undertaking and breaking the task into managable chunks makes the conversion process much easier and comfortable.

  2. Day-forward Scanning: If you don’t access you archive documents that often but would like to stop adding to the dead storage, you can start scanning documents as they come in and manage your digital workflow from there.

    Oftentimes, the new documents are the ones getting pulled more frequently anyway. You can put a desktop scanner at each employee’s desk, choose key employees to handle the scanning, or install a network scanner for everyone to access. As docuents come in, they can be scanned, indexed, and stored for later retrieval.

    If you choose this route and still find yourself accessing a certain set of archived paper records frequently, you can always scan that set in at your convenience.

  3. Storage, and Scan-on-demand: First and foremost, you may be interested in opening up your office space or moving to a smaller and more efficient building. We can take all of your boxes and store them at our site. Each box will get a unique barcode and be tracked to a location. If you need access to any records, we can pull them, scan them, and send them to you.

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