Organize Electronic Files The National Archives Way

Hard Drive Light Effects On the DocumentSnap Facebook Page, awesome reader Corey Adams shared this great video from the US National Archives.

The video is titled “Let’s Get Organized! Setting up your Electronic Files”, and is by Donna Read from the National Archives.

The presentation is a little geared towards agencies and larger organizations, but it still has solid tips for file organization, naming, and some of the challenges we face when organizing electronic documents.

It makes some great points about why organizing electronic documents up front is more important than with paper files.

Thanks for the tip, Corey!

(Photo by Matt Rudge)





About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 3 comments

James Markow - May 14, 2014 Reply

Oh How Simple!!!!!

When she placed the hard copy file folders next to the computer directories—

Digital filing became Simple!!!!!!!!!!!

Sam c - May 1, 2014 Reply

Interesting stuff , I had been practicing some but not all of this . The note at the end about the dead sea scrolls is an interesting one , digital long term archiving presents some interesting problems . Wikipedia has a page on this .

Corey Adams - April 25, 2014 Reply

You are very welcome Brooks. It is very important to have a standard for naming items in a digital system. As good as OCR can be it is not perfect so it best to have a good naming convention. Donna made some really good points in her speech that I think everyone can benefit from.