Document management: A case study Available to Purchase

In the course of constructing, maintaining, operating or upgrading facilities, Facility Managers generate and collect many documents. Their offices become repositories for plans, manuals, contracts, etc. These documents then begin to take on a life of their own. Stories about documents locked in drawers or cabinets for years flourish and are now legendary. Many documents accumulate on desktops, collecting dust, and others reside on local computers with no global access to their data. Software licensing, obsolescence, and incompatibility and lack of organisation are major problems. Crucial information is lost, misplaced or just hard to find. Organisational effectiveness suffers, and documents begin to lose their value as institutional assets. What are the best ways to collate and share existing information? How can a facility truly manage its documents? Which entity within an organisation has the expertise to undertake such a project? This case study reveals that existing resources within an organisation can help resolve the problem. At The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the library personnel have the required expertise in organising, cataloguing, indexing and managing both existing and future documents and are currently in the process of creating an electronic infrastructure for sharing institutional facilities data.