Digital management and retrieval of physical documents

Abstract

Although in today's everyday work environments digital and paper documents co-exist, the systems used to manage them are often completely separate; digital documents are managed using computer systems, while paper documents are organised and managed using manual systems. Since it is unlikely that the widespread use of paper documents will cease to exist in the foreseeable future, digital systems are needed for managing the storage and retrieval of paper documents which better integrate with existing systems for management of digital documents. This paper presents an architecture for a system to digitally manage paper document containers, such as folders, which has been used as the design basis for a prototype system we have developed. This prototype system aims to resolve some of the problems associated with an earlier prototype we have developed to integrate filing of physical folders with digital document management systems.