Conundrum

Saving paper documents. Where do you draw the line?

If document imaging had existed in the year 1215 AD, would we still have the original Magna Carta to view and appreciate?

Hopefully, the answer would be yes for the Magna Carta, the US Declaration of Independence, the Gutenberg Bible and a long list of other historically significant documents.

The question for virtually every municipality now is how to separate the potential Magna Cartas from the chaff when building and maintaining archives in the Information Age.

In this issue of Global Municipal Exchange, we take a look at the procedures that one progressive municipality, the City of Bellflower, CA, follows to try to retain the "right" paper files.

In the next issue, we'll look at how a Native American tribal government handles the same issues.

Conventional Solution

Debbie Pons manages most archiving issues for Bellflower, CA, as executive assistant to City Clerk Debra Bauchop. Bellflower is a progressive city that is strongly committed to increasing productivity through technology, including the use of document imaging as the primary way it retrieves and works with its archives.

Ms. Pons is as receptive to new technology as anyone else on staff, but she also takes the issue of paper preservation very seriously.

"We archive about 40 percent of the paper files we generate," she explains. "In evaluating what to save, we look at a how the document contributes to the history of what the city was doing at a particular time and why.

"We have files back to our incorporation and records of the very first city election. While they are more historical than vital, I would never think of destroying them.

"We now save the paper originals of resolutions, ordinances and minutes. Once they are approved, we scan them into our document imaging system and send the paper originals to the vault downstairs. It's a small fireproof vault that can't hold a lot of paper.

"Each year we purge records from each city department to go to off-site storage. We also purge our records from storage for potential destruction. When our state and federal retention periods are up, we go through the paper records with the appropriate department and decide which to continue to save and which to destroy.

"Before we had a document imaging system, we'd call our off-site storage facility to have the box brought over if we needed a file from the archives. We'd be charged a fee plus transportation costs. Then we'd have to go through the folder, find the document and make copies. Typically that could take two weeks.

21st Century Solution

Bellflower began to look for alternatives to paper files in 1997 as a remedy for the deterioration of valued municipal archives such as the founding documents, old maps and city council minutes. The primary problem was damage resulting from their being touched by human hands whenever there was a need to view them and/or copy them.

"We were looking for a records retention program that might have document imaging as a component," Ms. Pons says. "We discussed microfiche and talked to people who used it and decided that we really needed the ease of access and search and retrieval capabilities provided by document imaging.

"Though we continue to maintain fairly extensive paper archives for historical and legal purposes, we are quite pleased with the way that our document imaging system keeps up with changes in storage media, such as from hard drives to CDs and now to DVDs."

More and more municipalities like Bellflower are cutting back on the amount of paper being stored in their archives. Some save only the signature pages of approved documents, and offer unalterable images of the rest of the document as a legal copy of the original.

Bellflower's Pons adds: "As technology progresses, I expect that city employees generally will have more or a comfort level for dealing with images and may not feel the need to keep hard copies at all."

To learn more about maintaining historical archives, please visit these links:

The Memory of the World Programme of The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO):
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/index_2.html

The National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA) and the link to its electronic document management newsletter, Crossroads:

Society of American Archivists:
http://www.archivists.org/

This newsletter is an open space for you to share your experiences and knowledge. If you have a story about why or why not to keep paper files, or on another subject of concern to municipal officials, let us know. Similarly, if you'd like to suggest a document related conundrum for a future issue, please drop us an e-mail at usernews@Laserfiche.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

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