Store or scan example scenarios

Offsite storage: Alice

Alice works in the Academic Registry. Her team have been told that they will be moving to a new building, which will have limited storage room for paper records. Currently, Alice’s team have a large number of paper records of former students, which they store in a storage room. They won’t have space for these at the new building, but will still need to keep them for 7 years.

Alice assesses her team’s records and decides to have them stored offsite. She decides this because:

• The records are rarely accessed (around once or twice per year), so delivery costs will be low over their lifetime
• If a record does need to be found, it will be possible to retrieve it from storage by calling a whole box back, meaning that file indexing won’t be needed (which could be expensive)
• Any retrievals that will be needed can wait for next-day delivery, so there won’t be any extra costs for scan-on-demand or same-day delivery services

Having decided this, Alice follows the storage process, and (following confirmation that this is the best option for her documents) has her records picked up for storage. Her team can now concentrate on the rest of their move preparations.

Scanning: Brendan

Brendan works in a Faculty Education Team. His team has some paper student files that are kept in boxes in the team office. The team find that the boxes are detrimental to their working environment, and Brendan also recognises that this is not the most secure way to store these files. The team needs to keep them, but Brendan knows that they’ll need to find another way to do this.

Brendan assesses his team’s records and decides to have them scanned. He decides this because:

• The documents are accessed frequently (around once a week), so delivery costs would be high if they were stored
• Due to the complexity of the files, it would be impractical to find a record in storage using a box name alone, so file indexing would be required if stored (which could be expensive)

Having decided this, Brendan uses the scanning service, and (following confirmation from Print Services that this is the best option for his documents) has his records picked up by Print Services for scanning. The office is now a nicer place to work, and the records are securely stored on the University’s network.

Scanning: Charlotte

Charlotte works in Finance Services. Her team has some paper accounting records that are currently stored in a storage room in her building. However, Estates have recently been in touch to let her know that the storage room is going to be repurposed into a training room, meaning that she will need to find somewhere else to store the files. There is limited space in Charlotte’s building, so she decides to make use of either the scanning or storage service.

Charlotte assesses her team’s records and decides to have them scanned. She knows that the records are not accessed very frequently (about once per month), so could be suitable for storage. However, she also knows that when a file is requested by an auditor it will be needed immediately, which would be very expensive to arrange if they were stored offsite.

Having decided this, Charlotte uses the scanning service, and (following confirmation from Print Services that this is the best option for her documents) has the records picked up by Print Services for scanning. The storage room is now clear, as requested by Estates, and Charlotte can now focus on her day-to-day business.