Development of an integrated archives electronic document and records management system

Abstract

The Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT) is an institution of higher learning that creates records on a daily basis that eventually need to be archived. After investigating the process from the creation of records to their destruction, a gap in the process became evident. Due to that gap, this research investigates the lack of integration between the administration systems and the manual archiving system that causes large amounts of paperwork and records loss. Some systems were investigated show of how advanced records management systems are currently and how they handle the archiving of records. In order to create an electronic record system that ensures communication between the related records within the institution, increase security of the records and improve response time between the transfers of records, this paper utilizes design science methodology for investigation, and Django, SQLite, HTML and CSS for the software solution. The results enjoy the benefit of a functional automated system but suffers the limitation of scalability as it is a prototype with future upgrades yet to be implemented. The limitation is outweighed by the demonstration of integration between the different record keeping departments increasing efficiency in record keeping and archiving. The system design of the proposed integrated system is illustrated in this paper showing data flow diagrams, architectural diagrams and flow charts.