Ask people what the word “document management” means, and the answers you get will vary broadly. For some, it’s a catch-all phrase used to encompass everything from document scanning, to version control, to document retrieval, to document creation, to electronic and paper archiving, to document retention, and more. However, going deep into document storage, there are some key aspects at the heart of the process that make management of information effective. These are Metadata and Indexing.

Going as far back as records were kept, hand written documents were stored in folders and boxes based upon an agreed upon configuration designed for easy document retrieval. Shelving, filing cabinets, boxes and folders were used to implement a logical sub-structure system for bulk storing documents. An early example of the method was one used by governments for maintaining birth certificates. The storage of birth certificates could be maintained in a filing cabinet labeled by the hospital’s name, in a drawer marked with the year, and in a folder named by the month. This structure of birth certificate filing: hospital name – year – month, is the rudimentary basics of metadata attributes, and is structured to allow for efficient document retrieval.

With the progression of reasonably priced shared file servers people began producing exponentially more documents, yet the process of storing and retrieving the documents followed similar techniques as the old paper-based storage methods. Documents were stored and managed on shared file servers using folder structures that essentially mirrored the paper filing process.

The benefit of a document management system is that it allows people to store documents in a consistent folder structure while also including useful metadata attributes and providing full-text indexing. The combination of a logical tree-based folder structure and metadata allows people to quickly navigate to documents or to perform detailed searches for the data they need. The additional metadata associated with each document generally allows for a flatter (fewer sub-folders) storage hierarchy meaning easier navigation and less instances of misfiling of documents because the metadata attributes are displayed on the screen along side of the files as sortable column values. In addition, metadata attributes, when combined with full-text indexing, allows for searching that breaks the bounds of a folder structure and eliminates costly, labor intensive searches when the search criteria doesn’t match the folder structure.

Digitizing metadata can generate great efficiencies. Using the birth certificate example, when a request is received for a copy of a birth certificate using a shared file server based exclusively on a folder hierarchy, the search will not succeed if there is a requirement to retrieve information not represented by the folder structure itself. For example, a query that requires all birth certificates issued with Dr. Smith as the attending physician over the last nine months. If the physician’s name is not associated with the folder structure or part of the file’s name, manually opening and reading through the content of all the documents throughout the storage system is the lone option for finding the required records.