Document Retrieval Management
With an Efficient Document Retrieval System, You Could Save Hours
Stored documents would typically need to be referred again and again in the course of running your business. Retrieval might be easy as when you take out the Invoices folder for March 2007 and look up Invoice No: 1278. Or it could be quite difficult as when you want to locate a certain document that discussed some obscure point about a technology relevant to your business. You might have seen the document long ago, and stored it somewhere.
In a manual system, you or your secretary might spend hours trying to locate and retrieve that "forgotten" document. On the other hand, if you had scanned the document, stored it on the computer, and converted it into a text document using OCR technologies, you might be able to use a tool like Google Desktop Search to locate it in a few minutes. You just search for unique words contained in the document.
That brings us to the best kinds retrieval system currently available - the search engines like Google. These engines index billions of documents, and are able to bring up those containing the words you are searching for. The engines teach us how to set up a good retrieval system.
Elements of Document Retrieval
The following elements would be present in any document retrieval system:
- Document Repository: The documents must be stored and the store must be accessible to you. The Google index is an example. So are the filing cabinets and document rooms of your business.
- Sorting Algorithm: The mass of documents must be organized using some kind of sorting and classification algorithm. You then create a classified index that points to documents under each class and their locations.
- Request for Retrieval: You might tell your secretary to find the letter about a certain topic from such and such person. Or you might type in a query into your computer asking it to find the document matching the query.
A document retrieval action typically follows the pattern below:
- Making a Clearly Specified Request You search for a particular mail you received by indicating details like the sender of the mail, subject of the mail, date and/or unique words in the mail body to your email search program. Even in the case of a personal request to your secretary, if you specify more details, she might be able to find the document faster.
- Checking the Index Against the Request: The search function of your email program would try to match the criteria you specified with all the documents it has indexed. It might bring up a single document or a list of documents matching the criteria, or respond that there is no document matching the criteria. If it is your secretary who is doing the search, if she finds more than one document that matches your initial request, she might ask for more details to identify which particular document you want.
- A Ranked Listing: Search programs usually provide a listing of documents that match your request in full or in part. The documents in the list would be ranked in an order that indicates the degree of relevance to your request.
Conclusion
Documents would typically need to be retrieved more or less frequently. A good retrieval system would produce benefits in the form of large timesavings for doing this. We looked at the best retrieval systems, search engines, to identify the elements of a good document retrieval system. These days, desktop and email search engines are available to locate documents on your computer or email index.