Going Deep Into Document Management With Metadata And Indexing
Ask people what the word “document management” means & the answers you get will vary extensively. For some it’s a catch-all word used to include everything from document scanning to version control to document retrieval to document creation to electronic & paper archiving to document retention & more. However going deep into document storage there are some key aspects at the heart of the process that make management of information successful. These are Metadata & Indexing.
Going as far back as records were kept hand written documents were stored in folders & boxes based upon an agreed upon arrangement designed for easy document retrieval. Shelving filing cabinets boxes & folders were used to implement a logical sub-structure system for bulk storing documents. An early example of the practice was one used by governments for maintaining birth certificates. The storage of birth certificates could be maintained in a filing cabinet labeled by the hospital’s name in a drawer marked with the year & in a folder named by the month. This structure of birth certificate filing hospital name year month is the rudimentary basics of metadata attributes & is designed to allow for efficient document retrieval.
With the progression of less expensive shared file servers people began creating exponentially more documents yet the process of storing & retrieving the documents followed similar methods as the old paper-based storage methods. Documents were stored & managed on shared file servers using folder structures that essentially copied the paper filing process.
The benefit of a document software system is that it allows people to store documents in a consistent folder structure while also including useful metadata attributes & providing full-text indexing. The combination of a logical tree-based folder structure & metadata allows people to quickly find documents or to perform detailed searches for the information they need. The additional metadata associated with each document generally allows for a flatter fewer sub-folders storage hierarchy meaning easier navigation & a smaller number of misfiling of documents because the metadata attributes are displayed on the screen along side of the files as sortable column values. In addition metadata attributes when combined with full-text indexing allows for searching that breaks the bounds of a folder structure & eliminates expensive labor intensive searches when the search criteria doesn’t match the folder structure.
Digitizing metadata can generate great efficiencies. Using the birth certificate example when a request is received for a copy of a birth certificate using a shared file server based exclusively on a folder hierarchy the search will fail if there is requirement to retrieve information not represented by the folder structure itself. For example a query that requires all birth certificates issued with Dr. Smith as the delivering physician over the last nine months. If the physician’s information is not associated with the folder structure or part of the file’s name manually opening & reading through the content of all the documents throughout the storage system is the one option for gathering the required records.