Document Management solution for GSK
The Challenge
GlaxoSmithKline decided to digitise its worldwide R&D archive of laboratory notebooks. A Digital Document Repository had previously been established to enable all of its worldwide scientists to view and share ongoing research information via the Corporate Intranet. A decision was made to extend the benefits of this solution with the inclusion of historical research data in order to facilitate information re-use and knowledge sharing.
Within GlaxoSmithKline R&D, laboratory notebooks have a records retention period of 65 years. In addition, these notebooks are considered vital records within GlaxoSmithKline and as such a policy of microfilming the notebooks upon archiving to provide a secure backup copy was adopted. Two thousand seven hundred (2,700) rolls of microfilm were in existence at various locations in the USA and UK. The challenge was to find an efficient way to make these images available via the Intranet in a format that utilised the existing technology.
The Solution
e-docs UK were chosen to convert the films containing a total of six million pages into Adobe PDF format digital images. The films were sent to e-docs UK’s Scanning facility in Harlow, Essex where they were digitised using specialist film scanners capable of scanning eight thousand pages per hour.
Each digitised laboratory notebook was then converted to PDF and individually bookmarked at the page level to aid retrieval. Images were returned to GlaxoSmithKline on CD-R and loaded onto the Intranet Server by GlaxoSmithKline staff.
Commenting on the film scanning project, Diana Hayward, Director of Document Management for GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development said: “We chose e-docs UK because we had to complete the project within very tight timelines and we believed that they had the technical expertise and production capability to meet our requirements. We were impressed with the manner in which they increased their production capacity with additional shifts and that they were able to implement the project at short notice.”
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