A business may decide to scan all their current paperwork, but this is not quite the same as a managed digitisation project.
Quite often a project like this is undertaken for a number of reasons: to save money, to improve efficiency, and to save space occupied by paper. The dream of the “paperless office” has been haunting us for about 30 years now. It still hasn’t come true, at least not in the way they promised us. I can personally recall a time when scanning bureaux appeared in the UK almost overnight, offering to convert the contents of 25 file cabinets into digital scans, and put them all onto a single CD ROM.
The prospect of doing this often appealed to senior executives, especially as the next logical step in their minds would be to get all that paper destroyed (a suggestion that usually causes an information manager to shudder).
How it differs from a traditional digitisation project
Which brings us to the next aspect that interests me. How long are we intending to keep these scans? A digitisation project for a library or archive collection will most likely result in digital content which we wish to preserve and keep permanently, because it’s both a valuable digital asset and a digital surrogate of an important part of our collections. However, when we take on “scanning for business”, as I call it, it’s possible the scans might have a relatively short shelf-life.
This is where it starts to shade into a records management concern. In fact my ideal would be to see a scanning project owned by the records manager, with one eye on user satisfaction, another on protecting business and legal needs, and a third eye on the possible long-term retention needs.
Taking all this into account, ideally we’d try and frame this project with a different emphasis to the concerns we have when doing digitisation for preservation purposes. Our list of priorities when scanning for business might look a bit like this:
Metadata
People need to find stuff again, and any automated retrieval system will only work if there’s sufficient metadata for the objects stored in it. We’d like to think about using pre-determined metadata schema, depending on the nature of the content; tags, folders, and naming rules that will help users retrieve content. My point here is that metadata decisions will tend to be driven by immediate user needs, rather than archival or library cataloguing standards.
Image quality
For a long-term preservation project, our first thought would be of high-resolution image files encoded in robust, open-source formats. For business scanning, it’s highly likely we might be able to compromise on the quality. If we can get away with lower-resolution images in compressed files, it’s worth considering. It may depend on whether the staff want OCR as well as images, which is yet another consideration.
Retention and disposal
Our plan for scanning must align with records management plans. The content is still maintained for as long as there’s a business need, just the same as when it was in paper form. Likewise, we’d hope staff co-operate with our recommended best practices for file naming and description, to assist with those retention decisions.
Authenticity
We’re all concerned with creating “authentic” digital objects, but the business need in this scenario might be slightly different to how an archivist or a researcher regards an authentic digital object. In the archives scenario, the archivist wants to be sure the preserved object is a genuine representation of the original, and so do their users. In the business scenario, we not only need to be assured of that, but we also want hard evidence that is the case, for when the auditors start asking questions. We’re thus facing at least two tough tasks – ensuring the scans themselves are authentic when they’re created, and then making sure we maintain that authenticity through daily use of the scans. We’d certainly want some form of evidence chain and audit trail for that.
From here, we’ve got the bare bones of a successful business scanning project. We might soon be in a better position to safely destroy paper originals, if indeed that was one of the drivers or project goals. That destruction needs to be carried out with due care and attention. You’d certainly want all the digital content signed off as regards authenticity to prove the admissibility of digital objects as legal documents.
If however you succeed in secure shredding of a large number of boxes of paper, you’ve now freed up storage space and shelf space. That is something that has a cash value. If you keep metrics of progress in this area, you’re ready to start proving the value of your project to the organisation.
Projects like this aren’t necessarily easier to carry out than a library/archive focussed digitisation project, and they still require much planning and engagement with stakeholders. As I’ve tried to show above, the priorities have a slightly different emphasis. However, the results can be something of genuine benefit to your organisation, and will prove the value of the Information Manager/Records Manager/Archivist roles and services.