A frustrated customer contacted us to help bring some order to the thousands of newspaper and magazine clippings they had accumulated over several decades. Customer Manager Raimo Savolainen says: “These were taking up a significant amount of storage space at the customer’s home and office. The biggest problem, however, was that this valuable material could not be utilized effectively. We started thinking about ways to bring some order to the chaos, and ensure that the archived clippings could be utilized in the most effective way. The customer’s problem was solved by the creation of Edita’s digital document archive EDDA.”

Solutions that meet the customer’s needs

“Customers need flexible and agile solutions that large and centralized information systems cannot offer,” Savolainen says.

Edita Publishing’s long-term cooperation with the Order of the White Rose of Finland and the Order of the Lion of Finland was expanded to include the use of innovations. That’swhen Edita Publishing developed EDDA to help the organizations archive their photographic and documentary materials.

“Traditional indexing-based search systems have proved to be old-fashioned and rigid,” Savolainen says. “In developing EDDA, our focus was particularly on making information easy to find and use. The full text search we created for EDDA – which extends to the contents of the documents – is a rarity in electronic archives.”

EDDA is tailored to each customer’s specific needs. We familiarize ourselves with the materials to be archived, analyze the content and create an index term list. The index terms are defined in cooperation with the customer, and they correspond to the contents of the material to be archived. The materials are then digitized and stored on EDDA. Documents are assigned names and, based on metadata, material stored in the archive can be analyzed and searched. We train customers to scan and store files to ensure that they can supplement their archives on their own. EDDA can be accessed online and, depending on the configuration, it can be open to the public or restricted to a given group.

Archives are often thought of as repositories of dusty old documents. Customers don’t need to have decades of history behind them to benefit from EDDA. It can be used to archive any document – for example, a memo, an e-mail message, an online news article or a photo – and it doesn’t have to be even a day old. If necessary, the information stored in EDDA can be transferred to the National Archives of Finland.

Creating an electronic archive takes a lot of work, but it has long-term benefits. EDDA ensures that information and answers are always available.

Text: Paula Häkämies, student (communication)