The Recent Brooklyn Document Storage Warehouse Fire,
and Many Other Tragedies, Point Out Why Digitizing
Paper Documents Should Be Considered.
February 12, 2015 - Shoreline Records Management Blog
The massive fire
last week in
Brooklyn’s
CitiStorage
Document Storage
warehouse was
not the first time a
document storage
facility has been
destroyed. To
name a few, 1997
South Brunswick,
NJ, USA, 2006
London, England, 2006 Ottawa, Canada, 2011
Aprilia, Italy, and 2014 Buenos Aires, Argentina.
With 1.1 Million Cubic Feet of records potentially
destroyed at CitiStorage, including that of legal
firms, financial intuitions, medical practices and
hospitals (Mount Sinai Health System, New YorkPresbyterian Hospital, North Shore-LIJ Health
System and NYU Langone Medical Center),
accounting firms, and both small and large
businesses, the main question is and has been, why
have these documents not been converted to
electronic images?
Aside from the why haven’t records been converted,
businesses also have to contemplate what would the
cost be to recreate destroyed documents? What
would be involved? And what if those records cannot
be recreated? What would happen if original
blueprints, medical records, legal cases, or financial
documents are destroyed with no way of reproducing
them? “It’s 2015, why isn’t this information
electronic?” many people have asked.
Once records are digitized, companies will no longer
have to pay for records management services related
to document storage. After the documents are
scanned, no more costs will be incurred. The
electronic images can be on a hard drive, an internal
network, or cloud based storage all allowing constant
and instant access.
On Sunday, 2/1, many New
Yorkers woke up to thousands
of pages of private and
protected information floating
along the Williamsburg
waterfront and spewing through
the air. Not only are the records
that hundreds of businesses and
government agencies depend
on destroyed, the private and
protected information of their
customers and employee’s was
put on full display. Many of
these have names, addresses, account numbers,
social security numbers, which can be used to easily
steal someone’s identity.
“About the possibility that confidential patient
information might have been disclosed on a large
scale as the wind scattered unburned records, Brian
Conway, of the Greater New York Hospital
Association, said, “There’s no reason to believe
that’s a possibility.” Yet in one indication of the
city’s concern, the disaster recovery contractors, in
their neon yellow jackets, sealed off the entrance to
the rocky jetty with yellow caution tape early
Sunday and began to scoop documents out of the
water with nets and shovels.” – NY Times.
The electronic images of scanned documents are
more often of a higher quality than the original and
much more secure. The entire CitiStorage
warehouse could be scanned and stored on a few
hard drives, which are much easier to protect, keep
organized, and secured than thousands of boxes.
Credit:
"The Recent Brooklyn Document Storage Warehouse
Fire, and Many Other Tragedies, Point Out Why
Digitizing Paper Documents Should Be
Considered." Web blog post. Shoreline Records
Management, 12 Feb. 2015. Web. 31 Jan. 2016.