Today, continuing with the work in the front of house, I shadowed the front desk staff as they went about a typical day at the Archive. Well, as typical as any day right before the Christmas holidays. I was impressed by the way the system has been designed to ensure the accurate filining/shelving of items removed from the stacks.
I also learned about the process involved in finding, retrieving and scanning documents for users to search during their appointments. There is a 24 hour period required between setting up an appointment to view documents and the actual appointment. This is because many records are not kept on site.
It also allows time for the staff to find the correct item and prepare it to be looked at. There are many planners and architects who use the Archive, for example, who need to look at the plans for buildings that they are working on. The 24 hour waiting period allows staff to find the items in the stacks or off site, pull them, remove or preserve any damaged parts of the documents, and scan things like plans so that they are available to view digitally, thus preserving the physical copies from damage due to repeated handling.
I also briefly followed an internal request for documents. This was not precisely a front of house function but the process was similar. The documents were located, removed from their location, marked with place marker, and prepared to be sent to the requesting department.
The turnover for requests seems remarkably smooth and quick. While there are departmental goals to clear backlog, it is clear that work flow is managed in such a way as make sure that inquiries are not sacrificed to archiving and, likewise, time is never wasted when there is archiving to be done.
No comments:
Post a Comment