City of London digitises and archives records

The City of London Corporation has selected new corporate records management and archiving software to streamline its document retention.

The Corporation embarked upon a project in February 2006 to find a system to securely manage its growing volumes of information.

Roger Marshall, the City's information systems director, explained: “The City of London Corporation is over 800 years old and archiving our growing number documents and records has been an issue we’ve been trying to address for some time.”

Marshall said plans for a major building refurbishment, involving the decanting of the Corporation’s existing archives, spurred the authority into looking at not only moving its archives, but digitising them also. “We saw this as an opportunity not to just change the way we archive documents, but also improve our business processes,” he said.

The organisation has chosen to use Livelink enterprise content management (ECM) software from provider Open Text, and is set to start its implementation this month.

In addition to safeguarding historical and archived documentation, it is hoped that the software deployment will reduce the amount of time staff spend accessing and searching physical files in the archive.

Marshall added that the new software will help the Corporation meet common corporate standards in line with the government’s National Best Practice Scheme.

“It will eventually lead to one single source of truth, eliminating the duplication of both electronic and physical files,” he said. “Eventually we hope the solution will reduce the need for paper based files and ultimately bring greater efficiencies, which will reflect in the service we offer our residents.”

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