Definition of Archives (Document Management)

Standardized techniques for managing documents in an organization or entity

The concept of archival or document management is used in our language to name the standardized techniques used at the request of the administration of documents that belong to an organization or entity, a company or a library, to cite a few common examples.

An old discipline that evolved fantastically thanks to new technologies

We must indicate that although the techniques and practices that are applied have been changing and evolving as a direct consequence of the advancement of the new technologies in almost all areas, and of course archival was not the exception, we must say that archival is certainly an old activity and that is deployed by man since time immemorial before the imperative need to document, leave an administrative, legal or commercial footprint of everything how much does.

To give us an idea of ​​the tremendous evolution that there was in the matter of supports and techniques of

storage we only have to say that the most primitive men filed their "documents" on papyrus sheets or in clay, while those of today do so in the computer or any other electronic device.

The great contribution of computing and the Internet

In this sense, we cannot ignore that computing and the subsequent development of Internet have allowed a great advance in the matter of document management making the task both in terms of information storage and document retrieval stored.

Because of course before, those in charge of this task, archivists, librarians or archivist, among other names that have been attributed to those who develop This task, they had to use and use heavy registration books, cards, folders, boxes, shelves, while now just one click is enough to specify the file as well as the recovery of documents or works.

Main tasks that it performs

Basically, archival will deal with: generating and establishing a series of standards and practices that allow the identification of the documents that are being archived, the recovery of information from them, the time that they must remain archived in the case of those that can be eliminated after some time and on the contrary must guarantee the conservation forever of those documents that have great value.

Topics in Archival (Document Management)