The Carmelites are a religious order with long-standing presence in the Philippines. They are one of the more traditional sects; little of their work has changed since they were founded. As part of their philosophy, journaling and record-keeping is an important practice. These journals are maintained and shared with the Vatican.
With decades of existence and hundreds of contributors past and present, the order’s archives were growing by the day.
Overview
The Challenge
- Requests for files became more frequent. Maintaining purely physical copies made them challenging to share, especially with requests coming from all over the country and world.
- The older files had begun to deteriorate. These were important and irreplaceable.
- Filing and maintaining physical documents was time-consuming.
The Solution
- A production-grade Canon imageFORMULA document reader together with Therefore document management system
The Results
- File retrieval has been cut down from 30-45 minutes to 1 minute or less
- Files can be accessed easily and remotely by anyone granted access
- Delicate documents now have a digital copy and have their information preserved
Having such a unique and comprehensive documentation of history, the information had begun to become valuable to people around the world. These accounts supplemented the study and practice of other friars. One account was even part of a massacre investigation case.
Requests for these files posed several challenges. The physical copies were cumbersome to retrieve, tasky to ship to the requesters, and difficult to maintain the integrity of when shared with other users.
Furthermore, the older files had become dangerously brittle. Such important and irreplaceable documents needed to be preserved before they were destroyed by time or worse, by pests or an untoward accident.
Finally, manual recordkeeping was prone to human error. When a document gets misplaced, recovery would be no different from finding a needle in a haystack.
To preserve and properly manage the wealth of information in the Carmelites’ archives, the sect made the unprecedented move to digitize all their records. They acquired a production-grade Canon document reader together with Therefore document management solution.
Nine years into the project, six decades of records have been successfully digitized by the two-man archival team. Due to the highly confidential and delicate nature of the paper and their content, each one is scrutinized and categorized prior to scanning. Then, approved files are scanned in batches using the high speed imageFORMULA document reader.
Thanks to Therefore’s document management system, the organization enjoys the speed and ease with which they can now retrieve and share their files from a central repository. Even the least tech savvy members have no problem using the system.
Finally, the Carmelites can now breathe a sigh of relief knowing that their records are secure for generations to come.
