Guidelines for Managing Electronic Documents in Australian Government Agencies - Document management practices for individuals
Copyright © Commonwealth of Australia 1995
- DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES FOR INDIVIDUALS
- GENERAL
- CHECKLIST
Document management practices for individuals
GENERAL
Practices followed by individual users are a critical part of the corporate management of electronic documents.
CHECKLIST
Individual users of electronic systems should adopt and apply best practice in their personal management of electronic documents. The following guidelines are provided as a checklist for consideration.
- Use facilities provided with software to attach meaningful descriptions to documents.
- Use corporate standards, when setting up document descriptions; e.g., a corporate thesaurus. If there is no corporate thesaurus, propose one. Be aware of the agency’s standard abbreviations and codes and use them.
- Adhere to corporate standards for document style or format. If there are none, propose them. As far as possible use consistent document standards regardless of medium.
- Make use of spelling and grammar checkers and specialist dictionaries.
- Be aware of corporate security classifications for documents and ensure that your documents are classified appropriately.
- Ensure that staff have appropriate access to documents.
- Make use of version control facilities. If they are not available, use a regular and systematic back-up procedures.
- Record information about each document you create. This will help others to locate the electronic source of a paper document.
- Use facilities provided with software to attach documents to file folders; use corporate standards, when naming file folders. Preserve file folders along with the documents over time, as this provides valuable contextual information for future use.
- If you are short of storage space, do not delete documents that are of residual corporate value; ask for a secondary storage area for inactive documents.
- Back up document storage media regularly; if a secure off-site storage area is available, use it.
- Be familiar with your office automation facilities, particularly document management facilities. Ask for training if necessary.
- Only use password protection on documents when it is really necessary, and ensure that there is always someone else who knows the password.
- If documents are stored in a compressed format, then retain the software required to expand the documents to their original format; ensure that later versions of the compression software can still expand documents stored previously.
- Be careful when storing compound documents, ie documents that incorporate information in different formats such as spreadsheets, databases and graphic images; ensure that all the applications software required to recreate the document is retained.
- Be aware whether there is a corporate requirement for the document format to be stored with the contents of an electronic document. The document format includes such things as the page size, text alignment and fonts. Word processors commonly use style sheets for the document format. Documents can be saved with a style sheet included or they can be saved with a pointer to an external style sheet. Saving documents with pointers to an external style sheet will save storage space but means that the format of all those documents will change if the external style sheet is changed. This also means that if you are transferring documents to another location you must ensure that a suitable style sheet is available at the new location. This may require you to send the external style sheet with the document.
- Let the vendors of computing software know that the management of electronic documents is important; when choosing between different software products, take the management of documents into account as well as how easy it is to generate documents.
- Maintain a cross reference between electronic documents and related paper documents.
- If electronic facilities are not available for the management of electronic documents, then print the documents and follow standard registry procedures.