A full cabinet, boxes in the basement, a file that takes a whole morning to find: many organisations know this situation. Digitising your archives then seems the obvious answer. Yet running pages through the scanner is the simplest part of the project. What matters is decided beforehand: what to digitise, in what order, under what name, and for whom.
Sort, then choose your priorities
Digitising everything indiscriminately costs time and replaces paper disorder with digital disorder. A first sort divides your documents into three groups.
- Living documents: those your teams consult every week, such as current files, active contracts or recent mail.
- Documents to keep: those that are rarely consulted but must be retrievable and presentable, such as deeds, decisions or accounting records.
- Documents of no use: duplicates, drafts, copies of copies. What happens to them is decided according to your retention rules, before scanning.
This sort is done with the people who use the files. They are the ones who know what is really useful.
Choosing the first batch
It is rarely useful to process the whole collection in one go. It is better to start with a limited batch, for example one year's mail or the files of a single department, then widen the scope. Three questions help to choose this first batch.
- Which documents are consulted most often, and by how many people?
- Which are fragile, unique or exposed to damp, fire or loss?
- Which bring a whole department to a halt when they cannot be found?
A well-chosen first batch quickly shows teams a result. It also serves to fine-tune the method before applying it to larger volumes.
Name files so they can be found
A file called “scan_0042.pdf” is as impossible to find as a loose sheet. Set a naming rule before you start, and write it down on a single page.
- Put the date first, in year-month-day format: the files then sort themselves into chronological order.
- Add the type of document, then a reference or a short name, for example “2024-03-18_incoming-mail_0153”.
- Avoid accents, spaces and abbreviations that only their author understands.
- Apply the same rule in every department, without exception.
A simple rule that everyone follows is more useful than a very complete rule that nobody applies.
Indexing: describing who, what, when
The file name is not enough. Indexing means attaching a few pieces of information, called metadata, to each document: the sender, the subject, the date, the department concerned, the file number. These are what make it possible to answer a request such as “all the mail received from a given body last year”.
Character recognition, or OCR, completes this work. It turns the image of a page into text, which makes it possible to search for a word inside documents. Its result depends on the original: a handwritten, stained or faded page will be read less well than a clean printed page. So plan a human check for important documents. And keep it lean: a few well-completed fields are more useful than a long form that nobody fills in.
Deciding who has access to what
A digitised document circulates more easily than a paper file. That is an advantage, and it is also a risk. Before going live, decide who can view, who can edit and who can delete. A personnel file is not opened to the whole organisation.
Assign rights by role rather than by person: they will remain correct when teams change. For sensitive documents, keep a record of who has viewed them. If your archives contain personal data, our article on Law 29-2019 sets out the Congolese framework.
Common mistakes
- Scanning without sorting first: you then digitise the duplicates and the useless.
- Forgetting quality control: missing, crooked or illegible pages, discovered too late.
- Destroying the originals too soon, before checking the files and the retention rules that apply to your organisation.
- Keeping a single copy: without a backup stored elsewhere, one failure can be enough to lose everything.
- Not training the teams: a tool that nobody uses does not replace the cabinet.
The scanner is the simplest part. Sorting, naming and access rights are what give the project its value.
Doing it alone or with support
A small collection can be handled in-house, with a desktop scanner, a naming rule and consistency. For large volumes, fragile documents or high retention requirements, an equipped provider moves faster and more steadily.
That is the purpose of MOKILIX SCAN: high-definition digitisation, OCR, indexing and metadata, then electronic archiving. The entry price is stated as “from 35 FCFA excl. VAT / page”. The timeframe depends on the volume and is covered by a bespoke quote.
The project begins with two weeks of scoping, priced according to the analysis of your need, with no commitment to what follows. You keep the diagnosis, whether you go further or not. To discuss it, you can request scoping.
