Chichester City Council

In addition to the fact that the drawings and plans were generally inaccessible, they were considered vulnerable to damage or loss, a situation of concern as in most cases there existed only a single copy of each drawing.

Paper copy of the drawings made it difficult to share the contents with third parties including external contractors. To achieve this required that drawings be reproduced and delivered in hard copy, which was both time consuming and cumbersome.

Peter sought a solution whereby his extensive archive of drawings and plans covering the Council House could be protected, available and transmittable.

To achieve this, it was necessary to embark on a process of electronically digitalising each plan and drawing in such a way as to make them easily accessible via the City Councils private cloud environment and which ensured that all the intricate detail was captured, whilst maintaining file sizes at the lowest possible levels to allow for future sharing of the drawings via email.

The majority of the archive to be processed was of an A0 or A1 nature and whilst for the most part of a black and white type, colour scanning technology was to be used to deliver an absolute facsimile of the original work where necessary.

Each drawing once digitalised, was to be provided with an index title matching that of the original to allow for easy retrieval and for drawings to be potentially included within other of the Council’s applications.

Upon completion of the project the original drawings were to be returned to Chichester City Council and preserved within the archive.

Where previously only a single copy of each plan was available or had to be manually reproduced in hard copy, all relative drawings are now available via the cloud and can be easily shared with third parties as necessary.

In addition, information vital to the ongoing maintenance of the Council’s buildings are now fully backed up to prevent loss or damage.