Aaahhh the myth about the old Paperless Office!! How many paperless offices have you ever seen? I can't remember the last time I saw a paperless office. I can remember an account where I went in on a consulting job to a law firm. They wanted to convert all their paper to digital format and save it to CD's. The funny part was that they had a guy sitting at a scanner, he had a stack of documents on one side of him to scan to digital format. On the other side, he had another stack of paper documenting that he just converted the paper to digital!! Kind of Ironic! They created paper documents to document their digital documents. In turn creating more paper than they had before!! There is a great article in the April issue of my magazine talking about this very thing!! IF you haven't signed up to get it for free, you should do it soon. http://www.rmtechnology.com - And no this isn't an advertisement, it's an invitation for something FREE to all Records Managers!!
Kurt W. Stevenson
COO
RMT Magazine
-----Original Message-----
From: C Park [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 4:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Paperless Office
I think this is an interesting one....
We went through a period when all people talked about was creating the 'paperless office' and it was going to be the future for info management.
But I feel that we have almost gone full circle (well here in Cumbria we have) obviously we had the paper records, our stores were getting full, we needed solutions and digitisation was the obvious choice. Routes were explored and partial digistisation of some series records was attempted, however there were two problems - firstly, the quantity of records to be scanned/converted was huge and secondly, finding soft/hard ware that was going to remain compatible/readable in five years and also finding the funding to constantly 'update' technology. This I have to say is a major constraint within local authority working finding a source of constant funding as many initiatives are started but don't reach completion because the money dries up. So therefore we have had to go back to dealing with our paper records as 'paper' as boring as that sounds. Although I do believe that paper should be managed as paper and anything created electronically should be managed that way - but th!
at is just my opinion.
An important point I would make is that a paperless office will [probably] never be achieved within the archive profession. The reason for this being that you can for conservation or other reasons digitise a highly used collection to protect its condition but you have several problems - investment in/finding suitable equipment to capture/store high quality images for long periods that will remain readable, finding methods of low memory/low cost storage. What you find is that people asking for records do not want to see a digital copy of the record they want to see the original - so what do you do print off a copy because they want to read it! So not exactly doing anything to help the paperless office there....
Obviously ERM can be applied in other areas i.e. admin or back room functions, but I think where 'front line' services to the public are involved (you have to put them first, assume they are right and therefore honour their demands) paper will remain the media of choice for sometime to come. Because lets face it you would rather see the original Magna Carta than a digitised version that looks great on screen but you can't read it when it's printed out because your budget didn't stretch to higher spec scanning....quality control/technological compatibility are the hardest things to ensure whilst digitising collections.
Obviously things are probably different in other sectors...
Claire
Records Manager
Cumbria Records Centre
Ashley Street
CARLISLE
Cumbria
CA2 7BD
(01228) 607280
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