For centuries, people have been striving hard to preserve the valuable information of their organization. Thanks to several technological advancements, numerous ways to preserve and archive information were introduced to the world. The traditional archiving practice seeks to preserve physical objects (e.g., artifacts, samples, paper, photographs, microfilm) that carry information. In this article, we will talk about the latest method of preserving information – the digital archival technique.

In simple words, digital archival is converting a hard copy into a digital form so that it’s available for a long time. The technology isn’t like the pictures you click from your phone of written material. The process involves a smart technology that converts hard copy originals into electronic data. Digital archival results in graphic images, audio or video clips, images of text pages, and electronic transcriptions of text.

Digital archives were initially created to preserve historical objects and make them available to researchers. But today, it is widely used in different fields to preserve data for years to come.

Digital archival aims to preserve the digital document and its content, according to three criteria:

• The document must be preserved in its physical and intellectual aspects.
• The document must be preserved for a long period.
• The document must always be accessible and understandable.

A decent digital archiving solution requires several characteristics, such as:

• Converting files to a long-term preservation format.
• Describing archived information.
• Documenting the lifecycle and information preservation operation.
• Checking validity and fixity of information.
• Ensuring long-term integrity.
• Managing the retention period and disposition.
• Monitoring the file format and storage solution.

Benefits of Digital Archival

A digital archiving solution will help you to manage your information better and will free you from tedious paper and filework.

Easy and Fast Data Access

Considering the traditional method of preserving and storing important information, filing them or laminating them and then filing are the most-preferred options. And whenever you had to find a particular document, you had to spend a lot of time, going through several files and folders. Flipping through these files and folders was not only a time-consuming task but also a hectic one as you didn’t know which folder will help you. But when it comes to digital archival, it saves a lot of time when you are looking for a particular document. Once the digital copies have been made, you can sort and store them as per your convenience. Make sure you sort them in simple folders so that you can access the information as soon as you need it.

Paperless Offices and Processes

The world is moving towards sustainability and going paperless is one of the best ways to do so. Organizations prefer digital medium rather than paper for communicating. If you too are doing so, digital archival can be an additional step you can take. The digital copies of your valuable information are much better than photocopying them and sharing them with people. You can directly share the digital copies with people whenever required and cut down on your paper usage.

Managed Privacy Data

When you save your data in files and folders, it is difficult to safeguard them. People in your organization can access these folders without much hassle if you don’t hide them away properly. To keep these folders out of reach of unauthorized people, you will have to look for a difficult-to-reach place. The better option is a digital archival. Using this technique, you can store all the confidential information on a local drive and grant access to only the people you want to. You can even put security codes on these files so that people don’t open the files easily.

Long-term Availability

Once you store information using the digital archival technique, you don’t have to worry about its lifespan. The digital copies remain for a lifetime or till you delete the files yourself. This isn’t possible with documents and papers as paper tends to deteriorate and become brittle. Also, the print may fade away with time. In other words, the information will be inaccessible after a while.

A Wide Range of Archiving

Digital archival is an amazing technique to preserve digital copies of a wide range of items. Documents, photographs, paintings, charts, research studies, and a lot of things can be digitally archived and preserved. In other words, we can archive almost any hard copy so that you can access them in their digital forms whenever required. 

Why Choose College Copy Shop for Digital Archival?

In the simplest of words, we possess the right knowledge and tools for digital archival.

1. Ready for everything: From one letter to multiple boxes of documents, we can accommodate orders of any scale.
2. A wide range of document archival: We have scanned family documents, pictures, legal documents for reproduction, large-scale engineering projects, backups, and web access.
3. Large and varied customer base: We have successfully worked for large manufacturing companies, financial institutions, transportation networks, clubs, charities, environmental groups, telecommunications companies, government departments, marketers of various merchandise, and many small- to medium-sized companies and individual consumer clients.
4. Immense experience: We have been providing print and design services to the Edmonton region for over 40 years.
5. Comprehensive services: Apart from digital archival, we also provide other services like graphic design, digital printing, offset printing, large format printing, stationery and forms, displays, promotional items, variable data and much more.

So why look anywhere else for digital archival when College Copy Shop is here. Give us a call to get quotes for your archiving project.