Document Archiving and the Door to Institutional Memory

Dusty archives the words seem to fit together. In works of fiction, books and films, document archiving always seems to go with plenty of dust. In the movies you can see it billowing up in clouds as long-forgotten records are rediscovered.

All of this works well in fiction: Those clouds of dust, golden in the sunlight, mark the passage of time. The dust also symbolizes lost memories and forgotten knowledge memories and knowledge about to be restored by the efforts of the story's diligent searchers.

However, for organizations, dusty archives are not so good they contain memories and knowledge that have been sitting unused, going to waste or worse endangering your business.

Why Archives Matter

Archival documents are generally those that don't need to be used or consulted every day. Some are accessed on a fairly regular basis. Others may only be needed on rare occasion. And most likely, some of them should be destroyed before they come back to haunt you because they're past their retention date.All of them are repositories of institutional memory. They contain knowledge the organization created or paid for and solutions to challenges it faced and might face again.

This means that when archival documents are needed, they ought to be readily available. It shouldn't take an archeologist to find them. This is not always easy, which is why the image of dusty archives has become so familiar. Record-keeping formats and media change over time. These changes can render a document from a few years ago as hard to read as a clay tablet from the Bronze Age.

Blowing Away the Dust

The good news is that powerful, flexible tools for document archiving and retrieval are now available. Offsite storage provides greater efficiency and added security against mishaps. In addition, automated tools are available that can effectively classify your records based on available data. Documents that need not be archived can be securely destroyed in a defensible manner. As a result, storage costs can be reduced by up to 50 percent, while making pertinantarchival documents conveniently accessible.

Records management and document storage are the key to not only preserving institutional memory but also to remembering it transforming it from dusty archives to information that is available whenever it is wanted or needed.

Don't let your institutional memories gather dust.

LINK:	http://blog.ironmountain.com/2013/records-management-and-storage/docum...
	See more stories from ironmountain

Most recent headlines