In an era where data faces the threats of loss and inaccessibility, organizations of all sizes are grappling with the challenge of managing, organizing, and facilitating access to a large volume and variety of information.
The increasing prevalence of digitally born content, including emails, social media, text messages, and internal communications, adds complexities to storing and accessing files when needed. In addition, an influx of physical records requires comprehensive management throughout their lifecycle—from scanning and indexing to storage. While not all paper documents are essential for daily operations, retaining them may be necessary to comply with legal requirements or other regulatory specifications. This is where digital archiving becomes increasingly crucial for organizations.
Read on to explore the significance of digital archiving and how organizations embrace it to foster accessibility, compliance, and preservation.
Why is Digital Archiving Important?
In today’s digital landscape, where information is vulnerable to loss or inaccessibility, effective archiving becomes crucial for ensuring data integrity and accessibility. Additionally, given the growing emphasis on security and compliance, organizations must maintain a comprehensive data inventory. This means they need to understand what records they have, their locations, the format, and whether any duplicates exist. With digital archiving, businesses can rest assured that essential files are preserved and can be retrieved at any point in time.
Here’s a look at some of the key advantages of digital archiving:
- It eliminates the need for physical storage space and the associated costs of maintaining and managing paper-based records.
- It improves accessibility and ensures that organizations can access and utilize their historical records and information, that documents are available on any device around the world, and that they can be retrieved quickly.
- It safeguards historical documents and artifacts from deterioration, loss, or theft.
- It addresses security concerns by providing controlled access to sensitive data and ensures that content adheres to legal standards and industry regulations.
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Who’s Archiving and Why?
Archiving has become increasingly important as the volume of digital-born content continues to grow exponentially, creating countless files that require organization, storage, and immediate retrieval. From museums to global corporations to government agencies, digital archiving is used within various industries and is driven by different factors, including addressing security threats, ensuring global accessibility of documents or artifacts, enhancing operational efficiencies, and more.
Museums
Thanks to digital archiving, you can now visit some of the world’s best museums from the comfort of your home.
From the Louvre to the British Museum, museums worldwide are adopting digital archiving practices to safeguard artifacts from theft and potential loss while facilitating online viewing.
After losing over 1,500 artifacts to theft, the British Museum announced plans to digitize its entire permanent collection, totaling over eight million pieces. The project will require documentation and upload of more than 2.4 million records and will take more than five years to complete. The Louvre has also digitized 482,000 artworks in its collections database.
Global Corporations
Large organizations use digital archiving to improve efficiency and collaboration by ensuring content is readily available across the organization while preserving its history.
For example, Coca-Cola became the first non-media company to leverage digital archiving to create a powerful resource for managing a century’s worth of corporate marketing and advertising icons. This library of assets enables employees to access and use the material for future projects easily and bring nostalgic Coca-Cola marketing icons back to life.
Healthcare Organizations
Healthcare organizations have a significant volume of records to manage and a high urgency for integrated solutions that allow for secure access to archived physical and digital records.
In healthcare, digital archival services (recently acquired by Access) enhance the efficiency, security, and accessibility of patient records, enabling organizations to deliver higher-quality care while reducing operational costs and mitigating risks.
Government Agencies
Government agencies use digital archiving to strengthen national democracy through public access to high-value government records.
The National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) archival holdings include over 12 billion pages of unique documents. The agency’s digitalization strategy is focused on accessibility and providing public access to the federal government’s most critical archival materials. Additionally, it encourages private industry and others to reuse its digital content in new and creative ways.
Conclusion
With the abundance of content generated within organizations today—both digital and paper—comes the question of how to properly retain and manage data to maximize efficiency, collaboration, accessibility, and compliance across the organization.
As technology advances and the desire for digital-born content increases, organizations must have a records management process that includes digital archiving. Digital archiving gives businesses—of all scales—the ability to organize and retain digital content over the long term. And perhaps most importantly, it enables widespread accessibility and addresses security concerns, including non-compliance issues, theft, and data breaches.
To learn more about the importance of archiving and its relationship to records management and data retention, join us on Thursday, March 28th at 1:00 PM EST for our webinar, Preserving the Past, Managing the Present, and Planning for the Future – A Discussion on Archiving, Records, and Data.
This webinar is a discussion on the differences and overlaps between archivists, records managers, and data professionals, as well as the importance of archiving and its relationship to records management and data retention.
