Another measure I’ve taken to try and improve the company archives is to work on the statistics for the department. This was undertaken so that I could identify (and prove) the heaviest users of the archives. I used 3 criteria to determine the ranking:
Business importance (i.e. how important the documents are and how much it would affect the company if they were not able to be retrieved)
Number of boxes the department has in the archive
Usage (i.e. archival and retrieval statistics per month)
I traced the activity for each department back for one year (as that is all the documentation that was available, there not having been a proper system prior to this). From this I was able to calculate the top ten heaviest users of the archive.
Using this data, I then prepared a report on the top ten users. This covered:
Each department’s statistics
Specific problems I’ve encountered with their archiving policy (or lack of it to be precise!)
Details of any backlog from that department (in some cases backlogs of uncatalogued boxes and files go back as far as 60 years!)
Possible solutions to the problems outlined along with costings in terms of how many hours of my time it would take to sort out. What they really need to do is give the department it’s own budget and a couple more staff, but one step at a time, eh?!
I’ve found this really useful in terms of seeing what needs to be done – the scale of it is actually scary! Now all I have to do is convince my bosses to dig deep….!
