A small town police records management crashing may not seem like breaking news, but if you were dependent on the information found in the records, you might think differently. Records management is a key part of any organization’s information technology strategy, or should be.

This topic was inspired by the article, “Hard drive crash cripples police records system,” found in the GazetteExtra out of Wisconsin. A hard drive failure affected the records management system used by the sheriff’s office and police agencies around the county. A second hard drive, which was supposed to start working if the first one failed, did not take over. Law enforcement agencies didn’t have any access to the records system for a day and a half.

Just imagine not having access to your data for 36 hours. Access to data is important. It can be achieved by creating strong taxonomies. Proper indexing against a strong standards-based taxonomy increases the findability of data. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.