Paper Document Handling and Indexing.

[zmbd]

Looking for a few examples of paper document management.

What I've found on the internet are either nothing along the lines of what I'm after, or they are commercial applications. I initially started out with a library template; however, that has quickly fallen apart as it wasn't designed with this material in mind.

I inherited 7x4-Drawer file cabinets, 3x3Shelf Bookshelves, 3 banker boxes (originally 8 banker boxes) of mixed stuff, and a hodgepodge of unknown logbooks and binders.

I have text/reference books, white/research papers, catalogs, and the many (and I mean many many many) file folders that contain a month’s work of data for each type of data group (just for reference say: daily batch sheets; daily final sheets; daily test a results; daily test b results; and daily test c results). Often the white/research papers are in hanging folders within the file cabinets either in their own folder or mixed in with the “daily_*” in the monthly folders.

As I said earlier, I started out with a library type database template. It just didn't work as well as I would have liked, it doesn't handle the monthly hanging file folders with the daily batch/test documents well. What I need to track is the information within the document(s) and the location - the hanging monthly files are the worst to track in that a single day's information may be pulled by a management member and then another will pull the entire month's information - currently tracked via sticky-note on the cabinet drawer! Oh, and to make this extra special, the data is routinely removed for archive or the shredder. The Lib-DB handled the bookshelves very well… and treating the monthly stuff as a newspaper type item it was handling the daily stuff… OK, but not great.

I then started looking at the "Dublin Core Metadata Element Set", which sounded promising - but seems suited more for a flat-file using xml; however, the online is like reading modular furniture assembly instructions and the one reference file I downloaded is in "rdf" format and I can't seem to find a reader for it and Notepad just doesn’t do it justice.

So, slightly overwhelmed with tons of data ... now I'm looking around to see what else is out there as a starting point, even just a general schema-outline to get an idea of the tables, as I really don't see the company purchasing a commercial product for my little enterprise and the library database is a tad difficult to use for this situation.

[Seth Schrock]

Sounds huge, but maybe my simple understanding can trigger something for you. I've not seen the library sample database so I have no idea exactly what you have tried either, but I'll make a stab at where I think you are having the issue.

As far as what information that is in the documents, I'm not sure what you are keeping track of. Is it the same information for each type of document? If the information is the same, then everything should be able to go into the same table with an additional field to specify the type. Hopefully this is possible as I think this would make the checking in and out easier. If not, no big deal.

You mention the problem of one person taking a single day, and then another person could take the whole month. Not sure if this is important or not, but the person who takes the whole month, are they missing the day that was taken earlier? If so, then I think that the file containing the whole month needs to be seen by the database as a group of separate days instead of one record. My idea for how to check this out is to enter a date range of records to pull instead of selecting a record to pull. So for example, lets say I take the file for 1/12/13 and then you take the month of January. So when you check out mine, you just specify 1/12/13 and assign it to me. You then check out the month of January and specify the range of 1/1/13 to 1/31/13. When it pulls this range, I would use an update query that has a WHERE clause of Checked_IN_Stat us = "IN" to update them to be assigned to you. Mine wouldn't be included in this list because mine would have a status of "OUT".

I'm sure I'm over simplifying this, but I know from experience, most of the times that I get overwhelmed with trying to figure something out, I need someone to simplify it for me to see clearly. Hopefully something I've said has triggered an idea. Let me know if I totally missed your question :)

Sorry, I don't have any sample databases to offer you, but if my idea sounds interesting, I could whip something up to demonstrate what I was thinking of.

[zmbd]

Seth,
Yes the project seems quite large.
Documents... as noted are a mixed bag of information.
Take the Bookshelves: The textbooks range from chemical, physics, and engineering to microbiological . Some just reference tables, some with theory, and yet others that offer testing methods only. The library circulation program handles this material fairly well and the binders too as they are usually in that same realm as the books. The Testing folders, within a folder, the same paperwork for a given test for a given month.

As you've noted, I handle each paper within the monthly folder as an individual dated periodical within the library program. I had to add the largest numbr or queries.
I guess that overall the circulating library database does an adequate job of it, once I added a few queries and reports to handle the otherwise 100's of hand entries to checkout/in individual papers.

I'm not really in love with the categories, even though I've changed them.
I'm not really in love with the document ID's as they are based on the Dewey decimal and "periodical s" are not handled the best via this system
I really do not have a good location of documents via the DDs in that the monthly folders cycle thru the file cabinet drawers (as one empties due to archive, another fills and when full the next is cycled thru and so on; thus, the labels continually move as to what is where and if I need to relocate a document from one file cabinet or folder to the next, then I must issue a new DDN specific to that drawer/binder/folder, location otherwise I won't be able to locate it.