Zonhoven is a municipality in the middle of the Belgian province of Limburg. The municipality is located north of the provincial capital of Hasselt and has over 21,000 inhabitants. In April 2018, the municipality decided to start digitising the archive. They have chosen to have the digitisation take place in phases. Spatial planning was the first thing to do!
Increasing efficiency and ensuring safety
Nick Mols, Application Manager at the municipality of Zonhoven, has largely supervised this project and talks about his experiences: “The main reason for digitising the files was the lack of efficiency that we experienced. The files are frequently needed and must therefore be available at all times and everywhere. In the past, the employees had to go to the archive all the time to retrieve the files, which is of course very inefficient. We consider the safety of the files to be very important, and that, too, has led us to decide to digitise. A paper file also entails a potential risk of information loss, and digitisation always provides us with a back-up”.
Requesting files during digitisation
During the digitisation process, the Municipality of Zonhoven made repeated use of priority requests for files via the Virtual Archive. Due to the fact that the files are needed on a regular basis, it was important for them to have access to them at all times: “We conducted a market research in order to select the right supplier and finally Archive-IT emerged as the supplier that best suits the municipality of Zonhoven. What was very important to us was that the files could also be consulted during the scanning process. The way in which Archive-IT arranged this via the Virtual Archive fitted in perfectly with this. The emergency requests were dealt with very quickly in a secure manner. A major plus point was that Archive-IT always solved this in a correct and fine manner, and within the set time frame. Even if speed was still not fast enough, extra efforts were made to deliver the file on time.”
In practice
“We also took a look at Archive-IT ourselves and this gave us confidence in the way they handle the files. This is done in a very good environment and in a safe way. Our cooperation went very well and the image we got from Archive-IT is undoubtedly positive. It is a professional company that knows what it is doing,” says Nick Mols.