The South African Department of Public Works has signed a five-year contract with Metrofile for the storage of newspaper collections held by the Cape Town campus of the National Library of South Africa.
In terms of this contract, Metrofile will provide 1 000 storage bays in which to store the National Library`s existing bound newspaper collections in Cape Town. Metrofile will also be responsible for managing retrieval of these documents and will dedicate four on-site Metrofile staff and one courier vehicle for the daily deliveries.
"The National Library of South Africa receives and keeps originals of all newspapers published in South Africa, from the very first editions printed in the 1800s," says Douwe Drijfhout, programme executive for preservation services at the National Library. "We strive to preserve and promote the preservation of published South African knowledge and heritage resources for the sake of present and future generations. However, by its very nature, our newspaper collection expands daily and we have now outgrown our current facilities. Due to its document storage and management expertise, Metrofile was chosen to assist us in storing documents at its warehouses in Cape Town."
With more than 60 000 bound volumes of newspapers in its care, the National Library suffered setbacks when the off-site warehouse it was leasing for the storage of its newspaper collections was sold to new owners, and storage space at its Cape Town campus rapidly disappeared.
The National Library`s storage efforts were increasingly faced with problems regarding building maintenance, fire detection, security, access to buildings and cleaning services; while retrieval of its documents was hampered by the manual system in place to track and find each newspaper volume.
"Using MetroManager, Metrofile will manage the National Library`s collections much more effectively and efficiently," says Leslie Clark, sales executive at Metrofile Cape Town. "The storage of its documents in an off-site facility specifically designed for the storage of documents will provide the National Library with the assurance that its invaluable collections are stored according to preservation requirements; that the cost of this storage is no longer a major overhead; that all the newspapers have been indexed electronically and that the retrieval of the newspaper library is now automated."
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Metrofile, an Empowerdex BBB-rated empowerment company, is the South African market leader in the management of business documents, and is committed to helping customers reduce costs and improve productivity in processes that are centred on documents and corporate records.
All companies have a combination of paper and electronic documents, and are forced by law and customer requirements to secure the availability of the documents for the duration of their lifecycle. For most organisations, the volume of documents is growing at an exponential rate, and is becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
Metrofile is uniquely positioned to provide consulting and implementation of full lifecycle paper and electronic records management solutions from storage and conversion through to destruction.
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