Quarriers
Quarrier’s is a charitable organization founded by William Quarrier in 1871 operating from its own village in Bridge-Of-Weir, Renfrewshire in Scotland. Quarrier’s has been in existence for over 130 years and was formed to provide a home for many disadvantaged or destitute young children in Scotland.
As the years passed an the organizations ambition and reputation spread they started to provide help and support to individuals who’s conditions may have stemmed from a mental or physical disability or coming from a violent or abusive background.
Children who have benefited from the Quarrier’s experience can now be found living and flourishing all over the world.
Over the last 137 years Quarriers has created a wonderful historical paperwork archive of the people and their experiences that has evolved to show the heritage of the whole organization. TWD (UK) in conjunction with one of its partners was offered the opportunity by Quarriers to provide a digital solution that would securely hold and host their historical registers and administrative files.
Traditionally, Quarrier’s had archived this paperwork and in some cases had it converted to microfilm media, an expensive and laborious process both in terms of creating the microfilm records and in maintaining the outdated microfilm equipment. Additionally, company employees did not typically have direct access to the microfilm records, so servicing a query would take a significant time and resource whilst the microfilm record was retrieved, printed and delivered to the relevant department.
To overcome these problems, Quarrier’s decided to implement an electronic records
management system based on the ‘Alchemy’ product suite. The system handles a growing number of historical records that feed into the main operations of the company, such as Past Resident Information, Residents Relative search facility and Administration. The organizations A2 archive bound registers were scanned into the Alchemy database. Additionally, once the system had been proven, documents dating all the way back to the late1900 were also scanned and captured into the system, resulting in an environment which now hosts and manages documents electronically for vital area’s within Quarrier’s operational archival systems.
Original paper documents which did not need to be retained for legislative or historical reasons were confidentially shredded and disposed of after Quarrier’s had quality checked the scanned images and approved the paper destruction.
Quarrier’s staff and in authorized cases the public are now able to search for and retrieve documents and other information in just a few seconds – a huge improvement over the delays previously suffered when requesting paper records. Paper costs have reduced accordingly as well since many documents no longer need to be photocopied or printed.
From a technology perspective, the Alchemy environment sits comfortably within the organizations existing strategies for IT. The Alchemy repository and all the user interfaces to it reside on standard Windows PCs, linked by the local network. The scanned images are
written to CD media, then stored on dedicated hard drives with. One of the project advantages was that Alchemy was easy to role out and gave no performance issues to the existing network infrastructure as the images are compressed.
Additionally, the system requires minimum housekeeping and has been found to be totally reliable.
