Records Management Leons from Musical History and Loy Compreion by Amy Perras

If you've seen the movie Almost Famous, then you'll remember the scene when the main character caresses the albums his sister bequeathed him when she leaves home for broader horizons. He regards them with pure longing and love. This is my husband.

Jeff is a music connoisseur, or as I sometimes kid, a musical academic. He's not content to just listen to music that he likes. He listens to all music and often spends the most time on pieces he immediately dislikes. He scours the musical past by linking who has influenced who. Robert Johnson, The Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, The Pixies, Black Sabbath, Chuck Berry just a few that have highly influenced those that followed: Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Nirvana and even Kanye West.

Lately, he is fascinated by the fact that some historical music that was once created in another format loses part of the song when it is digitized. This is called lossy compression. What's irking is that when he purchases digital music from history he cannot get the whole truth, the whole song as a result of lossy. A musical indignity!

This got me thinking about records management. Sound conversion of paper records to digital format electronic with the proper quality controls thankfully does not suffer quality, rather, it maintains the integrity of the content and provides you an easier way of integrating the information into your workflows. No lossy here.

Many times hunting down archival records on paper is necessary to get answers for today. Just like those musicians who seek inspiration from the past, business leaders may find themselves with a need to mine information from paper archives and when they do, it is often a smart decision to take the time and digitize it. In this way, it can be integrated into their electronic content management systems (ECM) and easily accessed by authorized users. Chances are that once this information is located to meet a specific business need, it will be required again and often by multiple people.

For example, Insurance companies may be processing a recent claim for which they need to look back a number of years and this may mean retrieving a paper document that is in offsite storage. Rather than recalling the physical document and paying to transport it around, why not digitize it and make it readily available for a swifter claims decision while sending the original back to its archive home?

Records and Information Management is a very good thing for businesses because it has put controls, process and resources in place to continuously protect and manage records, not just for compliance, but to extract business value. When your business needs to answer key questions with confidence and doing so requires a look at paper records, take the opportunity to digitize them- and improve your ability to quickly access and share the information in future. And take comfort that you never worry about lossy compression with your records.

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

Most recent headlines