The new year starts differently for everyone. For New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, it begins with the daunting task of computerizing municipal records. Well, he is not personally taking on the task, but his administration is scanning millions of papers that have been stored away in private warehouses throughout the city and in New Jersey – 2.8 million boxes of papers to be more precise. This interesting information came to us from Politico in their article, “De Blasio aims to digitize old city records.”
The archives include, among other things, correspondence from mayors, City Council members and agency commissioners. Some of the oldest, most valuable records in the collection are too delicate to be computerized and their original format is much too historically significant. One example would be the hand-written minutes of 19th century meetings of the Board of Aldermen discussing hunting protocol.
With any digital archiving project, it is important to remember the value of a solid taxonomy. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
