How do people attempt to integrate the management of their paper and electronic documents?
| Date | 10 March 2014 |
| Pages | 134-155 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-01-2013-0007 |
| Published date | 10 March 2014 |
| Author | Matthew Jervis,Masood Masoodian |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
How do people attempt to
integrate the management of their
paper and electronic documents?
Matthew Jervis and Masood Masoodian
Department of Computer Science, The University of Waikato, Hamilton,
New Zealand
Abstract
Purpose – This article aims to describe how people manage to integrate their use of paper and
electronic documents in modern office work environments.
Design/methodology/approach – An observational interview type study of 14 participants from
11 offices in eight organizations was conducted. Recorded data were analysed using a thematic
analysis method. This involved reading and annotation of interview transcripts, categorizing, linking
and connecting, corroborating, and producing an account of the study.
Findings – The findings of the study can be categorized into four groups: the roles paper and
electronic documents serve in today’s offices, the ways in which these documents are managed, the
problems associated with their management, and the types of fragmentation that exist in terms of their
management and how these are dealt with.
Practical implications – The study has identified the need for better integrated management of
paper and electronic documents in present-day offices. The findings of the study have then been used
to propose a set of guidelines for the development of integrated paper and electronic document
management systems.
Originality/value – Although similar studies of offices have been conducted in the past, almost all
of these studies are prior to the widespread use of mobile and network-based shared technologies in
office environments. Furthermore, previous studies have generally failed to identify and propose
guidelines for integration of paper and electronic document management systems.
Keywords Digital documents,Information management, Documentmanagement,
Electronic documents, Office study,Office work-flow, Paper documents
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Although paper has had a significant role in the development of our society over the
past millennia, the rapid development of computer technology towards the end of the
twentieth century threatened to render paper obsolete. As this technology has evol ved,
there have been predictions of a future paperless office. Despite these prediction s,
however, the paperless office has largely remained a myth (Sellen and Harper, 2003).
While a relatively small number of offices in recent times have made a complete
transition to a paperless environment, most offices continue to use paper in some way,
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
The authors would like to kindly acknowledge the valuable contributions of the office
participants who shared their time and expertise with them, as well as the anonymous reviewers
of this article for their valuable feedback. The study reported in this article was approved by the
Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences of the University of
Waikato.
AJIM
66,2
134
Received 23 January 2013
Revised 20 September 2013
Accepted 2 November 2013
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 66 No. 2, 2014
pp. 134-155
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-01-2013-0007
due to various advantages that paper documents have over electronic documents
(Steimle, 2012).
The continuing use of paper documents, as well as a wide range of electronic
document and information management tools, in offices leads to fragmentation of
information (Jones, 2004) and document managem ent. As Jones (2007a) points out:
Information that was once only in paper form is now scattered around in multiple paper and
digital versions. Digital information further scatters into “information islands” when each is
supported by a separate application or device.
There is, therefore, a need to develop systems that better integrate paper and electronic
document management. However, in order to guide the development of such systems a
greater understanding of the document management needs of present-day office
workers is required.
This article describes a study that we have conducted in order to gain a better
understanding of current paper and electronic document management practices in
modern offices. The study utilized observational and interview techniques to
investigate the systems and methods for organising and managing documents in each
of the offices studied, and the problems that are encountered in managing documents.
The article begins with a review of the related literature (Section 2) and a discussion
of the motivations for the study (Section 3). This is followed by a description of the
methodology of the study (Section 4), offices and participants involved in the study
(Section 5), data collection and analysis methods used (Section 6), and the study
findings (Section 7). The article also includes a general discussion of the findings and
their implications for the development of integrated paper and electronic document
management systems (Section 8).
2. Literature review
Although the focus of this article is on document management, it is important to note
that there are also significant bodies of literature that investigate related issues of
information management, content management, and records management. It is
therefore important to briefly review these terms.
.Information. Boardman (2004) quotes Feather and Sturges’s (2003) definition of
information as “an assemblage of data in a comprehensible form capable of
communication and use”, and based on this gives his definition of information as
“any assembly of data which carries some meaning for one or more people”.
.Documents. Henderson (2009) quotes the definition given by the International
Telecommunication Union’s Open Document Architecture standard as “a
structured amount of information intended for human perception, that may be
interchanged as a unit between users and/or systems”. Jones (2007b), on the other
hand, considers documents to be “information items”, which “encapsulate
information in a persistent form that can be created, stored, moved, given a name
and other properties, copied, distributed, deleted, transformed, and so forth”.
.Content. This term refers to any recorded information, whether it is stored for
computer access (e.g. in a database) or for human perception (i.e. documents).
Although content can be physical or electronic in form, the term is mostly used to
refer to electronic content.
Paper and
electronic
documents
135
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