IN THE NEWS

Record keeping is a never-ending challenge for municipalities, and Northampton County in eastern Pennsylvania is no exception. In addition to the usual document storage, Northampton County houses an extensive historical archive stretching back more than 250 years. In 2004, the County ran out of space for its growing archives and turned to off-site storage for some of their files.

When it comes to choosing storage options for a correctional facility or detention center, security and space are always top concerns. Whether you need to store weapons, inmate property, or medical supplies, your method of storage has to be secure and keep stored items safe by controlling access.

As your facility and personnel grow, so does your need for storage. Expanding your storage capabilities shouldn’t mean outsourcing storage or expanding your facility. Your existing storage may need to be working harder for you. The MobileTrak5® is Datum’s leading high-density storage solution.

Following a sizable merger, a U.S. refinery needed to find space within its corporate facility for 80 additional workstations and corresponding files. The department expanded to include seven work groups that all needed convenient central access to corporate tax documents. Previously, the department relied on lateral files, rotary cabinets, and vertical filing cabinets to manage its file storage needs, but with the addition of the workstations and limited floor space, the client needed a new alternative.

How can all of those lighter-than-the wind individual pieces of paper become such a dense and heavy mass when collected and filed? Anyone who has ever been tasked with moving a full filing cabinet, or boxing the contents of one up for storage, knows that it takes a bit of strength to budge that weight. Many offices are stocked with filing cabinets, lateral files or other storage methods that not only collect that paper weight, but stack it fairly high.

Hardcopy paper medical records are notoriously vulnerable to security violations. Hazards ranging anywhere from unprotected FTP access to normal (and unfortunately common) human error make medical file storage a challenge for healthcare providers everywhere. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) instituted guidelines for the secure handling of clients’ Protected Health Information – or PHI – and officials follow through with strict recourse anytime an agency fails to maintain compliance.

It’s time to look at the budget again. For government agencies and public entities, that means careful consideration of storage, shelving and filing systems. Safety, security, space and asset allocation, mobility and capacity are all top priorities – and common difficulties – for most public and government organizations.

While you can find plenty of debate on whether the paperless office is a myth, paper usage in the U.S. reached its peak in 1999, followed by a steady decline of about 1 percent per year. That’s great news for the environment. Yet according to the Clean Air Council, the average American office worker still uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year, generating about two pounds of paper per day.

Since 1865, the Montana Historical Society has been building and preserving one of the nation’s oldest historic collections. By 2014, that collection had stretched to seven miles’ worth of precious records and artifacts stored on open shelves. The shelving system left items vulnerable to damage and dust and made poor use of the society’s space.

The General Services Administration is a federal agency established on July 1, 1949, by President Harry Truman. Created to streamline the federal administrative work and involved in the disposal of war surplus items, today the GSA serves as the primary purchasing authority for all federal government agencies.

The products you use have to keep up with your duties and provide a maximum level of accessibility while maintaining patient protection and security. But in today’s fast-paced world of cyber-hackers, identity theft and digital fraud, you can’t go far enough to protect your personal information and the information of your customers and patients. And legally, it is necessary to take standard measures to protect the information your customers have provided you.

All filing systems are not built the same. Your needs are as unique as the type of files you use and one size does not fit all storage and filing needs. Whether your files are of the manila, hard-bound, boxed or antiquities variety and fill a room or are housed in a filing cabinet, Datum has the right solution for your office, business or institution.