Restoring records damaged by Katrina

A New Orleans University, whose archived records were damaged in Hurricane Katrina, embarked on a large digital imaging project to restore them. Grantham University, which had to grapple with 48 filing cabinets containing waterlogged documents, chose Imaging Solutions Company to digitize the more than 377,000 pages of records.

Christine Shelly, executive VP of Grantham Education Corp., says, "Imaging Solutions came back with what we thought was the best methodology to go about completing the project in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner. They took a portion of our records and gave us a sample of their work, which, for us, was proof that they could do the work and they could do it well and we would be satisfied."

Because of past experience and planning for disaster recovery and business continuity, Grantham was already storing new information on remote servers. More current student and alumni records had been digitized, stored and backed up regularly, Shelly says, so that data was spared from the hurricane.

However, a portion of the older archived records of former students and graduates from the 55-year-old institution had not been processed into the school's document management system and existed only on paper. Those were the documents that were damaged by Katrina, and the university decided to digitize them so that transcripts and other records would be available to former students.