Hello,

I work for a mining consultants.  One my jobs is to create a  catalogue so 
employees can locate the digital and paper copies of our technical reports.  
The digital copies are stored on our server by client name and the hard copy 
reports are filed by company name.  There are a few indexes in Excel, for 
current and past projects, that include the project name, project number, 
project location, type of work and commodity.  The problem is, if we are 
looking for, say, an example of a report on a gold due diligence review or a 
report on a copper project in Chile it is tediuos to search through the 
spreadsheets or to try and remember which project fit the bill.

At my last position, with a mining company, I created just this sort of 
catalogue for locating their hard copy technical reports, maps and 
administrative files.  I used a free-form database called askSam because it 
was easy for people with very little database experience to use – in case I 
was on holiday, got hit by a car etc.  It worked very well.  However, this 
time, since I have the luxury of having much of the information I need 
already entered into spreadsheets, it seems logical to create a relational 
database.  I would want the users to have the ability to search by the 
access points I just mentioned, and other key words.

My employer was thinking of using Access, as we already have it as part of 
Microsoft Office Professional.  I have only used Access for storing 
membership information for an organization I belong to and tracking who’s 
renewed, what class of membership and who gets renewal notices and for 
generating mailing labels.  I created various queries to generate reports 
for marketing purposes.  I'm not convinced that Access will offer the 
searching capabilities necessary for what I want to create.  It seems to me 
it is for tracking business transactions, sales and marketing information 
and that sort of thing, not for creating searchable indexes or  catalogues.

Has anyone used Access for records management purposes?  Did it work well or 
did you end up switching to a package that is made specifically for records 
management?

Further down the road, I’d like to include a link to the electronic copies 
of the reports.  Has anyone used a relational database package that allows 
for that?

Any comments / warnings / advice are welcome.  Please contact me directly, 
unless there are others on the list that might be interested.

Thank you.

Stephanie Thomas

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