Jamestown Public Schools was honored recently in Los Angeles for its efforts to better manage its records.
During the Laserfiche Institute Conference in Los Angeles earlier this month, JPS joined seven other organizations from across the United States and Canada as winners of the Run Smarter Awards. The awards recognize organizations that have been successful in solving information management challenges by using Laserfiche software.
Karen Briner-Peterson, JPS director of human resources, and Pam Brown, JPS records management coordinator, were in Los Angeles to accept the national award for the education sector.
''Our vendor - General Code, which is out of Rochester - has asked us to speak with some other school districts in the past about our successes,'' Mrs. Briner-Peterson said. ''They suggested that we make an application to (Laserfiche), indicating what we have done with it, and we did that.''
Mrs. Briner-Peterson said that award winners had their conference fees picked up by Laserfiche, which allowed them to more easily attend the conference.
Jamestown Public Schools' archive system has become state-of-the-art through its use of the company's software.
''Originally, what we intended for it to be used for was just to be able to create a secondary personnel file for each of our employees,'' Mrs. Briner-Peterson said. ''What we've been able to do now is really extend that into other areas.''
She said that all schematic drawings of the district's buildings are in the system, which allows for maintenance staff to access it on location instead of having to travel to the warehouse for physical drawings. She also said that legal documents such as contracts dating back to the 1970s are on file.
''That allows us to do word searches and that sort of thing, so if we want to go back and track the historical progression of a specific contract provision, we can do that very easily now,'' Mrs. Briner-Peterson said.
During the three-day conference, Mrs. Briner-Peterson and Mrs. Brown attended seminars, labs and presentations that demonstrate how electronic document management can be used. They were able to acquire even more strategies for success in document archiving.
''The thing that we really focused on was security,'' Mrs. Briner-Peterson said. ''We went to a two-and-a-half-hour class on making sure that we know how to set up security appropriately, so that the people who need to access certain files are allowed to and other people who wouldn't be able to see those types of files would be locked out of them.''
According to Nien-Ling Wacker, Laserfiche's president and CEO, Jamestown Public Schools and the other honored groups have done themselves a great service by taking the initiative to upgrade their archives.
''We recognize these organizations for automating workflow and business processes to increase their productivity,'' Mrs. Wacker said, ''but more importantly, we recognize them on their initiative to go green.''
Other honorees included the City of Lynwood, Calif.; Thurston County, Wash.; the City of Okotoks, Alberta; BC Biomedical of Surrey, British Columbia; Berger Financial Group Inc. of Medicine Lake, Minn.; Texas A&M University's AgriLife Department and Health Sciences Center; and The Star Tribune of Minneapolis.
Mrs. Briner-Peterson said that Jamestown Public Schools' application of the software is on par with much-larger schools.
''We attended a discussion where (the University of Southern California) presented on how they handle their faculty members,'' she said. ''We were doing a better job, only because we're smaller, but we both seem to have the same types of ideas.''
