The other benefit is to prospective students, she says, because all their information stays together. "From a customer service perspective, things have improved greatly, and acceptance can happen more quickly."
Eyes to the Future
Several years ago Loyola Marymount University (Calif.) began to incorporate various document management solutions. It's a process that Vice President for Information Technology Erin Griffin calls "more of a road map than finished construction, because the theory keeps evolving."
There were, of course, document scanners that tied into LMU's Banner system and made digital versions of student records and historical documents. But it wasn't long before the school realized the need for something that could do more.
"Document management used to be just scanning and imaging. You were trying to capture what are nonelectronic documents into an electronic format," Griffin says. "But now so many of our documents are originally in an electronic format. Now it becomes a question of life cycling. That's where the world of document management is starting to focus. What do you do with the document once you have it? Who has access to it? How long does it need to exist? How many copies need to be distributed? The concept of document management becomes more of a content management concept, and I think that those two worlds are converging."
The world of document management is starting to focus on life cycling. Who sees what and how long must a document exist?
Toward that end LMU chose Enterprise Document Management solution from Xythos. It's a web-based application that provides access to a complete set of document and file management features, including document check-in, check-out, version control, workflow and document classification, and retention.
The school is currently using the system more for enterprise created documents rather than for external documents that are scanned and archived. Enterprise documents might include faculty research, contracts, internal communications, building designs, and more.
"One of the great things we've been able to do with Xythos is to share content that is ordinarily difficult to share with vendors and external colleagues," Griffin says. "For example, we're in the middle of a library construction project right now, and we can have all the blueprints and even a 3D virtual reality fly-through stored and accessible to the architects and the people internally who need it."
The digital documents are accessible on campus or off, and they can be accessed and edited by those with the proper permissions. "It has been a tremendous resource for faculty who are doing collaborative research around the world," Griffin says. "You can provide access to the documents to anyone with whom you want to collaborate, and there is version control so you can track different types of edits. It provides an inherent flexibility and inherent capacity for collaboration that you can use in about as many ways as you can think of to collaborate with people."
But the focus at LMU is also on the future and full-blown record management capabilities to meet the challenges of an increasingly litigious society. New federal rules that took effect last December require corporations and institutions to preserve and produce electronically stored information in the face of litigation or face stiff penalties.
"From an IT perspective, the amount of information that most of us would be required to produce in the event of the receipt of a subpoena would overwhelm traditional archiving methods. We'd be restoring backups left and right," she says. "It would take huge amounts of manpower and dollars to restore the kind of information that we're going to be compelled to provide access to. So clearly the move to disk archiving and the creation of archives that are life-cycled is an important focus for us right now."
"We no longer have to print and stuff envelopes. With our grade mailers, you just print, fold, and seal." -Neil Baker, Roanoke Chowan Community College
The Xythos system enables that control by redefining the purpose of backups and document storage.
"A backup made for the sake of a restore in the event of a disaster isn't necessarily the same as one made for data recovery," Griffin says. "The process of transferring, for example, tape backups to live servers old data for someone to peruse to find certain types of information would break you. We need to look at digital archiving as the methodology for electronically discoverable information, and that has to reside in a different part of our archive."
