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Pennsylvania State University: Imaging at Penn State: One Solution, Multiple Variations
9/26/2002
Accounting
Accounting is one of the largest departments within the Corporate Controller’s Office, which oversees the university’s finances and was the initial point of installation for OIT products at Penn State. The office also includes Payroll, Risk Management, Financial Reporting, and Research Accounting. The latter monitors the grants and expenditures related to all of the academic research at Penn State.
When Accounting was paper-based, most of the several million records were stored away from the office site.
Both retrieval and re-filing were labor intensive. Operators who now scan between 3,000 to 5,000 pages per day—in addition to credit card receipts and statements—replaced the old retrieval process in 1997. Now the most recent records reside in a RAID storage system for near instant retrieval. As records age, they migrate to an optical disk jukebox where retrievals may take a few seconds.
Nearly all of Accounting’s records are now digital, and the rest will follow shortly. Workers with security clearance view the images (primarily accounts payable documents) using a Web browser.
Law Enforcement
For the University Police Department, the issue is not the overload of paper as much as accessibility and “share-ability” of records. Bruce Kline, a 30-year veteran of the Penn State Police and Assistant Director for Administrative Systems, oversees the documentation of about 3,300 cases per year. “Most take from three to 10 pages, but in 1997 we had a shooting that generated thousands of pages.”
The bigger challenge is sharing information regionally. University Police interact with six different city police departments, the Borough of State College that administers two townships, and two other townships with their own P.D.s. Those offices and the regional 911 center exchange information on a regional intranet. The University Police staff of 65 views any of the departments’ 2.5 million pages almost instantly. Although not yet implemented, they have the potential to fully share their files with any agency they choose via conventional browsers.
Undergraduate Admissions
The Undergraduate Admissions Office was ripe for remote access because of its structure. The Office processes applications for admission to all undergraduate programs at 20 campuses. Now Web access to student applications and supporting documents replaces a tremendous amount of manual filing, shuffling, and a flurry of faxes and phone calls. Remote workers simply log in and call up any records they need to see.
Penn State receives about 50,000 undergraduate applications a year. This is complicated by the fact that it is a seasonal load, with most arriving in the fall, and that supporting documents often arrive independently and sporadically and need to be associated with particular applications. The solution is that each paper application receives its own bar code when it arrives. When supporting documents arrive, the mainframe database finds the applicant by name, social security number, or other identifiers, and assigns the application’s barcode to the new arrivals.
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