We had a meeting this morning in which the accounting department desired
to have the annual statements for about 8000 accounts available on-line.
They wanted the backfile of statements to 1984 available to save time
and effort in using the fiche copy. I called the department responsible
for creating the COM fiche to determine the possibility of resurrecting
the data and dumping that to a txt file. These accounts are some really
long term accounts so the thinking was sound.

 

Interestingly enough the IT people on campus actually had the data back
that far but it was in a very old format. The individual who had written
the routine to dump the data to a report had long since retired in the
mid1980s. There was no one who could write the reports.  In speaking to
various programmers there was no one familiar with the data format - and
we are talking about some 50+ year old people managing the data. It was
in none of the old formats I had seen. We could get the data live but we
would be unable to write the report. 

 

Instead we will be imaging the COM fiche to a TIFF format and accessing
the images. There are a number of lessons here from data migration,
software and knowledge management - not to mention extinction.. 

 

I asked why they even bothered keeping the data but I did not get a
clear answer. 

 

Raymond K. Cunningham, Jr. CRM, CA

University of Illinois Foundation 

Urbana IL 


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