10 Ways People Kept Records Before Paper

Today, we live in a digital world, in which paper is quickly becoming an outdated source of records storage. But what about the days before paper?

Here are 10 ways people recorded information before paper and mass printing became available.

1. Bamboo

Chinese scholars wrote on bamboo stalks as long ago as 500 BCE. The scholars used small knives to scrape away mistakes. These knives became a symbol of political stature, as the owners had the power to change records.

2. Birch Bark

Birch bark manuscripts have been found in India, Russia and the Middle East. Birch bark was used in medieval Russia for school exercises, personal letters and business ledgers.

3. Bones and Shells

Ancient Chinese oracles used shell & bone fragments to predict future events. Oracles carved questions onto the bone or shell, then applied heat until it cracked. They interpreted the crack patterns as answers from deities.
These “oracle bones” date back to 1400 BCE & represent the earliest records of Chinese writing.

4. Clay Tablets

Cuneiform, one of the earliest writing systems, is often found on clay tablets. The first libraries consisted of clay tablet archives. Ancient Mediterranean civilizations used clay tablets for sophisticated accounting systems.

5. Ostraca

Ostraca, or broken pieces of pottery, are considered the “scrap paper” of ancient civilizations. Ancient Athenians used ostraca to cast votes when the government wanted to banish a citizen. This gave rise to the term “ostracize” which means to exile or banish.

6. Palm Leaves

Palm leaves were used in Southeast Asia as early as 1500 BCE. Scholars theorize that Southeast Asian scripts contain mostly rounded shapes because angular letters split and broke the palm leaves.

7. Papyrus

The oldest discovered papyrus scrolls date back to 2500 BCE. The word “paper” derives from the word “papyrus.” Papyrus was expensive to produce and became a monopolized resource in the city of Alexandria. It was often washed and reused to save money.

8. Parchment

Parchment is made from goat, sheep or cow skin. Its use as a writing medium was perfected in Pergamon (modern day Turkey) as a cheaper alternative to Egyptian papyrus.

9. Silk

Some of the earliest known manuscripts of I Ching and Tao te Ching exist on 2,000 year old silk. Silk manuscripts were used for philosophical, mathematical and military records in China.

10. Wax Tablets

Wax tablets were made of wood panels covered in soft wax. Entire tablets could be erased by melting the layer of wax, giving rise to the Latin expression “tabula rasa” or “clean slate.”

Looking to take your office past the days of paper? Deploy a Laserfiche solution and get started quickly with the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, which offers pre-built workflows for processing digital contracts, permits and more!

Want to learn how to maintain even the most sensitive of records, despite the challenges of the modern era? Get your copy of the “Ultimate Guide to Records Management“.
Download the eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Records Management.

Tech Tip: How to Use URL Parameters to Pre-Fill Form Fields

Often a will contain several generic fields that many respondents will answer in the same way. Rather than making users fill in these fields, which can be repetitive and time consuming, organizations can pre-populate them with the correct information so that, when users open the form, these fields will already be filled in. To do so, organizations will need the form’s URL and the variable names associated with the fields they want to fill in.

Filling in the fields of an electronic form can be repetitive and time-consuming. Rather than making users fill in those fields, organizations can pre-populate the generic form with the correct information that multiple respondents will answer in the same way.

This can all be done by linking to a specialized URL that includes all the information you want pre-filled in the form when users click it.

For example, let’s say you were emailing an event singup form to clients, and your email lists were already sorted by region. For the emails going to California, you could change the link from:

www.website.com/signupform

To:

www.website.com/signupform/?State=CA

To dig a little deeper, let’s take a quick look at the basic structure of these specialized URLs:

baseURL?variable1=value

All you need to do is replace baseURL with the form’s current URL, variable1 with the variable associated with the field to be filled in and value with the appropriate field value.

To fill in multiple fields, insert the ampersand symbol (&) before any additional variables:

baseURL?variable1=value&variable2=value

In the example below, on a purchase order form that is only available to Laserfiche employees, the Company field was pre-populated using the following URL:

baseURL?Company=Laserfiche.
Browser window with pre-filled URL in address bar.

Note that these URLs can also be generated using a digital workflow.
Pre-populating form fields can both reduce errors and save time for whoever is filling it out, increasing efficiency of staff and satisfaction among customers.

Customer Spotlight: Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group

Discover how Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group wanted to deliver a more seamless experience for its staff and customers. Learn how online forms and other technologies helped the firm reach its goals.

Continue Your Journey

Compare top enterprise content management (ECM) vendors on G2

Digital forms can be powerful, but can be utilized even more effectively in conjunction with other ECM features and tools. Check out the G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and compare top vendors on the market.
G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems

Get more out of forms within Laserfiche

For those eager to learn how forms within Laserfiche can be made even more effective, be sure to check out these enhancements available on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace!

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Want to further explore how Laserfiche can help your organization achieve its goals? Schedule a consultation today.

Records Management Makeover, Kentucky Style

Kathy Jenisch, Records Manager for Kentucky Sanitation District No. 1 (SD1), had quite a messy document management problem to clean up.

Her organization, the second-largest public sewer utility in Kentucky, had been fined $40,000 for failing to produce just eight pieces of email — and that didn’t include the operational expense of paying several employees to spend six hours a day for three weeks searching for documents they couldn’t find.

Then she discovered that the organization’s offsite storage facility was allowing records to get moldy or rodent-infested — leading to the destruction of almost six tons of documents.

On top of that, she had to comply with a new state government transparency law that required her to create a website that displayed records about the organization’s financial expenditures as well as its annual budget and annual audit.  The records needed to be searchable, updated monthly, and maintained on the web site for at least three years.

The solution to all these problems was obvious. Digitize SD1’s records.

That’s not to say it was a simple process. SD1 did it on a project by project basis.

One such project involved 27 tubs of documents. Jenisch spent $20,000 hiring a digitizing service to prepare and scan the documents. The job was completed in five weeks, as opposed to the years the department estimated it would have taken to do on its own, she says.

Having records digitized paid off when SD1 had to respond to requests for documents associated with a state audit. Instead of pulling HR file folders from archive and hand searching for the documents, the search took only a matter of minutes. SD1 was also able to summon up historical documents dating back to the creation of the organization, board meeting minutes, policies and procedures, travel expenses, board and staff contact information, and budgets. SD1 could search and copy everything to a CD in about an hour. Without digitized documents, it would have taken days to comply with the audit request. SD1 passed its state audit with compliments to its record keeping, and aced its local annual financial audit as well.

Jenisch has advice for other organizations contemplating a similar move. “Just start somewhere,” she says. “Pick a project and get started.  You can’t mess it up, it can always be changed or revised.”

3 Reasons Electronic Records are Safer Than Paper

People can have a strange kind of cognitive dissonance when it comes to electronic and paper records. Many people won’t think twice about handing their credit card (with the security code prominently displayed on the back) to a high-school-aged waitress. Similarly, they may have no problem leaving their credit card bills and checks in their mailbox for hours or even days. But if you ask them to use paperless billing or online bill pay, they’ll refuse because they’re concerned about security.

Something similar can happen in organizations. When companies convert from paper to electronic documents, many employees suddenly become concerned about the security or the privacy of their data…even if the organization has not traditionally been concerned about the security of its paper records.

“Nobody asks about privacy when the data is in folders sitting on desks,” Dr. Rhonda Dean Kyncl, assistant dean for academic services for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, said in her presentation at Empower 2013. “But it’s held to a different standard when it’s online.”

It’s important, of course, to safeguard the security of electronic records. But many people don’t realize that electronic documents are inherently more secure than paper records. Evidence supporting this was published as long ago as 1996, for example, in a paper in the Journal of the American Medical informatics Association.

Here are three important ways paper records are vulnerable.

Inappropriate access: This can occur when people gain access to unlocked record storage areas and file cabinets (particularly when they look like they belong there). It can also occur when they find records left on counters, offices, or copy machines, or receive misdirected fax copies. In fact, whenever paper copies are sent to other places — whether it’s other offices, insurance companies, or government agencies — the data on them can be read by mailroom workers, administrative assistants, and other unauthorized individuals. This access could be accidental or intentional, but either way, the data on the paper records management can be compromised. Electronic data, by contrast, can be encrypted so that even if it’s copied or stolen, the information can be protected. Also, electronic records can more easily have sensitive data redacted for certain uses.

Data tampering: Anyone with access to a paper record can remove pages, add entries, erase or otherwise tamper with authentic entries. Electronic records can have a digital signature that notifies people when this has happened, as well as a time stamp that indicates whenever a record is transferred or modified.

Loss: Because paper files need to be moved around and filed again, they can be lost or misfiled. Electronic records tend to stay where they are, often with audit trails and other indications of which people have used them. There are other limitations as well: Paper records are typically not copied. If something happens to them, there’s usually no backup. Destroying paper records presents another set of problems: they can often be recovered by the wrong parties after they’ve supposedly been disposed of.

A survey by the Ponemon Institute showed that respondents found paper to be less secure than electronic records in a number of ways. While the survey dates back to 2008, there’s no reason to believe that paper is any more secure now.

 

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