InContext April 2008

EDRM solution spotlight

National Maritime Museum

Download PDF case study (500KB)

The National Maritime Museum is the largest and most important museum of its kind in the world and employs over 450 people. It is housed in historic buildings forming part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. The Museum attracts over 1.6 million visitors every year and incorporates the Royal Observatory (home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian Line), and the 17th-century Queen’s House - England’s first fully classical building.

The Challenge
The staff at the Museum work across many different physical locations within the site at Greenwich. They are involved with the management of hundreds of thousands of artefacts, images, paintings, plans, documents and letters as well as all of the incoming public enquiries. They face a huge volume of often complex tasks, managing the many telephone, email and letter enquiries received from around the world every year. These enquiries from the public are highly varied and can range from researching a ship that a father once sailed on, to requests for copies of historic photographs and ship plans to assist with model building. These sorts of enquiries typically involve requesting numerous paper files from the Museum’s archives. As well as needing to streamline these processes the Museum also faced a number of compliance requirements, such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Modernising Government Directive.

The Solution
The Museum turned to TRIM Context, the electronic document and records management (EDRM) system from TOWER Software in order to make the retrieval of documents more efficient and reap the advantages of knowledge sharing and workflows.

“We chose TOWER because the team clearly knew its product and understood our information issues. The system is easy to use, highly configurable. To date, I’ve been particularly impressed with its reliability and the speed at which the system was implemented”, commented Julie Keith, EDRM System Administrator at the National Maritime Museum.

The workflow application became the most extensively used part of the EDRM system. It spans the both the Museum’s acquisition processes as well as all of the incoming enquiries from the general public. The system offers the ability to not only store a particular record but all of the other files related to it, making it the ideal tool for cataloguing and tracking its pieces together with all of the documentation that accompanies them.

The EDRM system manages the request of the file and the particular archivist and then starts a workflow to track it; specifi cally where it’s been and when it’s due back.

The Outcome
Implementing TRIM Context has hugely simplified document retrieval at the Museum as well as allowing it to comply with new Government directives.

Sue Kennedy, Head of ICT Services explains, “The project was originally driven by compliance requirements such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Modernising Government Directive. However, we’ve since expanded the remit of TRIM Context and it now manages around 237,000 documents. The system includes meta data stretching back as far as 1970. This allows us confirm instantly whether or not we still have older files as people request them. Although it’s hard to quantify exactly, TRIM Context certainly saves a lot of administration time as there are no paper files involved.”

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