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National Content Digitization

Case Study:National Archives of Egypt (NAE)

Presented by: Ahmed KhafagyEnterprise Content Management Service Area Leader, IBM MENA

May 2011

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Agenda

1 National Archives of Egypt (NAE) Background

2 NAE Business Problem & Solution Outline

3 NAE Project - Challenges, Lessons Learnt & Recommendations

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National Archives of Egypt (NAE) - Background

What is Enterprise Content Management?

The first national archive in Egypt, in the modern sense of the word, was established by the Revolutionary government in 1954 for the purpose of collecting and preserving documents that formulate the material of Egyptian history throughout all eras, facilitating their study, dissemination and publication

The supreme council of the National Archives of Egypt is supervising the following mandates: Establish rules for documents’ preservation Designate documents for publication Decide which documents are to be transferred to the National Archives Decide which documents are of historical value Specify conditions of viewing and photocopying after obtaining permits Decide about the disposal of records of government ministries.

Problem Statement

NAE had huge volume of historical records (25+ million records)stored in 20 warehouses without being classified, indexed; they had problems retrieving those records for various purposes like research, individual/corporate services, legal … etc; the physical nature of those historical records/documents was a barrier for thelong term preservation; a 4 year program was needed to transform the manual operations used in receiving, classifying, protecting, securing national/governmental documents into a more modernized operations utilizing technology and leveraging international best practices and standards so that those records could be easily classified, indexed, digitized and published to the public, according to well designed policies

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National Content in the context of this project focused on collections of historical Governmental archives (documents/records) & Individual archives/sources

National Archives of Egypt – Business Problem

What is Enterprise Content Management?

Target Solution: a coordinated solution to address seamless Integration of People, Process and Content to improve National Content Services

Content• Classification scheme

• Indexing standards (e.g. ISAD)

• Languages

• Physical nature

• Search & retrieval patterns

People• NAE employees

• Content experts

• Scholars/Researchers

• Public users

• Warehouses’ managers

• External governmental users Processes/Policies/Regulations• Historical Vs Current archives

• Laws, regulations and policies to govern national content

• Publication policies

• Receiving process from governmental entities

WWW

Restricted accessNo Public reachSecurity issues

Limited research services

No dissemination policiesNo standard processesNo integration services

20 warehouses full of unclassified content -aged hundreds of years

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National Archives of Egypt – Solution Outline

Portal Hosting ServicesOffsite Data Entry ServicesGovernment Entity 1-N

NAE Warehouses NAE Scanning Center NAE Data Center NAE Research/QA Halls

Scanning & IndexingOperations Infrastructure

National Archives of Egypt External/Offsite premises

Content Experts - QA - ResearchersSpecial A0 Scanners Classification/Repair/Assign IDs/Audio Metadata

Publish ContentTransfer audio

files & data

Transfer Governmental Archives

Portal hosting - updated published contentComplete data entry and QC

Public Users

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National Archives of Egypt – Operations Flow

Onsite Repair damaged content and classify records Assign unique IDs for folders/files/documents Record meta data (ISAD) as audio digital files Upload audio files to Data Entry Center

NA

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Wa

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Onsite Scan documents using special scanners Link digital content to meta data through unique IDs OCR Latin languages documents and enable content free text search Control scanning quality (against paper documents) - rescanningN

AE

Sca

nn

ing

C

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Offsite Listen to audio files

Complete data entry on the system supported by dictionaries and Thesaurus Quality control data against audio files - corrections

Dat

a E

ntr

y C

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Onsite Quality Assurance scanned and indexed digital content Set security access & confidentiality policies Publish content to the public Public & Scholars access - search & retrieve digital content

NA

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te

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National Archives of EgyptChallenges, Lessons Learnt & Recommendations

Challenges

Time constraint to complete 25 million records in 4 years Limited space to host hundreds of operators to undertake operations Many non Latin languages which limits OCR accuracy – non standard old fonts Restructure manual indexes to adopt the ISAD standard Availability of historical content experts Reinforce laws & regulations so that governmental archives are transferred to NAE as per laws

Lessons Learnt & Recommendations

Paint vision & develop strategy for managing historical national content Plan for differences between current archives Vs historic archives Take decisions for centralized Vs. distributed conversion models – onsite Vs. offsite –

this is very critical to the success of the initiative Develop ambitious yet realistic roadmap to digitize national content Implement effective communications & change management plans Avail executive sponsorship that coordinates with different stakeholders and facilitate decision making Identify relevant standards to adopt as early as possible e.g. ISO, ISAD … etc