Regarding the archiving of survey field notes, there are probably as many opinions and practices out there as there are members of our profession...
I will be among a group leading a professional development seminar on 'field notes'. My role specifically is to chair a panel discussion on field note storage and long term retention, including digital records. Among the issues that will be discussed are governance and professional liability, information management (accessibility/retrieval), media and technology preservation and obsolescence (I have an unopened box of 3M 8" diskettes as one of my visual aids).
This will be an interesting debate to be sure. There are terabytes of digital field data in the form of GNSS raw files, total station observation files, etc., together with other related project records (plans, work orders, emails) at this office alone on our servers with entire file rooms dedicated to paper documents.
I'd love to see any relevant white papers or other web sites that any of my professionl colleagues have found that discuss records management and archiving of with survey data. It would be particualrly interesting to learn of any court cases where the field notes were entered as evidence along with a signed plan.
In case it's of interest, see [msg=62946]an earlier post[/msg]
As a new company (2 years), we keep everything digital and backed up with Dropbox (also syncs all files to our computers locally so we don't need a server) and a portable hard drive on my machine. Dropbox has all your data backed up in 7-9 data centers around the world at any time.
We do not take many hand written field notes, almost everything is entered into the data collector. We very rarely make sketches, we take pictures. Inverts are about the only thing we write down. Anything that does get written down is scanned as soon as it comes in and the paper copy is generally thrown out once the project is done. We generally do not keep signed copies of maps in the office, only CAD files. If you need a new print we plot one out and I sign it. Most deeds and filed maps are all available digitally from our local clerks offices and copies of older deeds are scanned in. All research is saved in the project folder. I hand write very little when I do my analysis, just about everything is typed...I create a survey report for most projects and save it to the folder.
We have 2 years of projects (about 225) in one file cabinet. I have one flat file for construction plans and such that I get in, we try to scan those when we have the time the toss the paper prints.
I just bought records of a surveyor dating back about 70 years and we are about to start going through them and scanning/sorting them. Can't wait to get rid of those storage units...
I don't see the need to have so much paper floating around...
Tom
:'(
Is that guy crying?
That's what I wanted to show...
Old dinosaur dying here...
Don
Don't worry...one day I'll be in the same boat when some youngin' is using some technology that hasn't even been though of yet...
