Office software
Over time as personal computers arrived on our desktops we used them to create a wider range of documents including text documents, spreadsheets, CAD designs and graphics. Suites of office software were introduced by companies such as Lotus and Microsoft and the cost of computer storage reduced and the volume of data that could be held increased dramatically. The PCs were networked to facilitate access to shared resources such as mass storage, printers etc. Teams of users would set up shared directories so they could all access their electronic documents.
Document image processing (DIP)
In the late 1980s we saw the introduction of scanners that could scan and digitise images of paper documents, photographs etc and hold them as a digital image. This plus the introduction of lower cost digital storage and laser printers led to a situation where instead of microfilming paper documents when they became inactive we could scan incoming paper documents and manage them in an electronic folder on shared computer storage throughout their life.
The tide had started to turn. For ten to fifteen years we had been creating a growing proportion of documents on computer systems but had still printed them out and filed the "master" paper copy in a paper folder. This was referred to as a "print to file" policy. The main reason for this had been that the folder also contained incoming paper documents. The only way we could see incoming and outgoing correspondence together was as paper documents in a paper folder.
With the arrival of affordable scanning we could suddenly start to regard an electronic folder as a master folder and could simply save our electronic documents into the folder and scan and digitise our paper documents and save them in the same electronic folder.
Electronic document management (EDM)
By the mid 90s we saw imaging integrated with the management of electronic documents in a new range of Electronic Document Management systems.
Initially these systems managed each document as a file and linked the file to a database record for that document. The metadata was held in a relational database and if documents shared common metadata attributes you could group them together in a folder.
Most of the systems were geared to managing active documents - either incoming paper that needed to be captured and routed to someone to process or new electronic documents that were created as drafts, annotated, edited and then issued as approved documents. The suppliers were not targeting the long-term records management market and so government users continued to manage their formal records in paper folders on records management systems.
