A company produces a large amount of hard copy records and other documents related to its business activities. Storing such records and documents and ensuring their retrievability can greatly support company operation. These documents used to be paper based, but nowadays they tend to be in some electronic form (email, file). It is important in both cases that documents are stored in a standard form ensuring long-term readability and easily searchable form. To achieve fast searchability, documents should be complemented with document type-specific metadata during archiving. Documents belonging together should be linked electronically or placed in a single electronic folder. If a record might be used as an item of evidence in the future, it must be stored in a form which guarantees its authenticity.
The images of the electronic documents and physical records the user is looking for appear on the display without delay, so there is no need to retrieve the original copies.
By making copies of every document and storing these copies at a central location, the system allows building better guarded archives protected against unauthorised access and implementing strong access control.
Documents can be added not only general but also custom keywords varying based on the physical record type, thus making retrieval much easier.
There are various automatic mechanisms facilitating the association of keywords with physical records, thus making gruelling indexing tasks more convenient.
The CRAFT system provides tools to describe the connections between physical documents. It allows creating links between documents and placing related records into single electronic folders. Since such documents are often needed together when retrieved, finding one of the relevant records will enable the user to immediately access all other records linked to it.
As record images are available on a continuous basis, retrieving an original physical record is rarely necessary. As a result of this, physical records can be kept at cheaper storage facilities farther from the site.
When using CRAFT Authentic Electronic Archives, all electronically signed records stored in it are accepted as items of evidence, therefore, it is not necessary to retain the original hard copy records.
