Calculating Indexing Needs

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Once a database has been designed and the target properties identified to index, we should plan for the time required to add the "intelligence" to our documents. Our planning tool provides a simple method to help determine the time required for manual indexing of the properties. A few simple settings and the target time frame can be determined as show in the following figure.

Storage Alternatives

Users have long dreamed of digital mass storage of their legacy archives. Various affordable storage options are now available thanks to cost reductions in on-line magnetic storage and near-line optical based systems.

Magnetic (RAID) storage is best used as a medium for on-line, active records. CD-ROM and other optical media (DVD, Worm, MO, etc) are efficient near-line and off-line media for the many archives in a less active stage. With a 25-year life for CD-R and 250-year life for stamped CD-ROM's, optical media storage offers long-term viability over paper. CD-ROM's are also valuable for long-term archival needs because of the non-erasable nature of the CD and its acceptance as a legal audit trail.

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DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) technologies will emerge over the next few years as even better storage alternatives over CD-R. First generation units are now over four - six times the capacity of CD-ROM's (2.6 Gigabytes) and has recently moved to 4.7 GB. Second generation DVD-RAM technology is expected to approach 25 times that of CD is also just around the corner. That means a single DVD disk will hold over 50,000 engineering drawings with access times approaching magnetic storage. The advent of jukebox exchangers, with their ability to handle hundreds of CDs or DVDs, tremendously increases on-line storage capacity.

Determining your Storage Needs and the Right Media

Many factors weigh in determining the storage needs of a particular client situation. The type of media used plays an obvious role, but there are other factors beyond the size of the image or documents being placed on the media. CD-R for instance requires each close session overhead and numerous track gap overheads. If you are imbedding a viewer and the index (full text or database) onto the media to create transportable databases, additional storage is required on the media that takes away from space allocated for the actual image or native files.

The justification and tools are here for your company to make the move towards the allusive paper-less environment. Proper and informed planning ensures that your move to the digital archive will be successful.

Once you have determined your department or enterprise-wide storage needs and selected the right media your next step might be to plan how to manage documents and/or drawings via local, intranet or the Internet. Document and drawing management can encompass ones ability to store, search full content, view, print or publish critical information assets for your organization or your customers regardless of the file format.

About the Author
David J. Wilson (dwilson@openarchive.com) is President of Open Archive Systems Inc., a leading provider of Business-to-Business digital archiving and management systems. Mr. Wilson is also an International speaker and author.
The Open Archive Systems, Inc. has developed a free planning and analysis tool presented in this paper that is available for download by visiting www.openarchive.com.

David Clendenen is the Editor of AECVision and Managing Editor of AECCafe.com

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