"No-one surely would scan the kind of colour coded process documents to
which Paula refers in a monochrome process while they were still in live
use"

I am afraid that they would and they did try!  

This is why I believe that the modern records manager has to have a very
close working relationship with the IT department so that you can raise
these issues and make service managers aware of the implications of their
decisions at the earliest opportunity, ideally at the inception of the
project not at the end of it.

Paula

Paula J Smith MSc



-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Emmerson [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 27 October 2006 13:08
To: 'SMITH, Paula'; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Legal Admissability of Scanned Records


The question here was about legal admissibility not active use and the key
factor is, as Marc suggests, whether the colour is significant in that
context.  No-one surely would scan the kind of colour coded process
documents to which Paula refers in a monochrome process while they were
still in live use and once they are scanned in colour it becomes maintenance
rather than a creation issue.  It would really become an evidential problem
- weight rather than admissibility - if the fire authority (or whoever) was
required to defend its actions in court and needed to produce the document
to demonstrate the procedures which should have been followed.

In the good old days of monochrome microfilm systems, document creation was
often changed to allow for the medium - colours on drawings and diagrams
were replaced with hatching and colour coded document sets had the name of
the colour printed on them to distinguish between the red customer copy, the
green accounts copy, the blue warehouse copy, etc.  Some of these also had
variable fields but the base document usually contained everything.  The
only problem was that as the 'nth' carbon the microfilm image was probably
illegible.  

Have I really been in the business that long?




Peter Emmerson
Director
Emmerson Consulting Limited
Poplar House
5 School Street
Witton-Le-Wear
County Durham  DL14 0AS 
Office          01388 488865
Mobile          07740 942682
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