By Catherine Sasman
WINDHOEK
The Documentation Warehouse in Khomasdal – accredited by the National Archives of Namibia as a storage facility and storage management company – is in the process of extending its capacity to accommodate as much as 242 000 boxes of information.
The new warehouse is expected to be completed by early next year, said Managing Director Wouter van Zijl.
Its current capacity is 30 000 boxes with mostly financial data stored in the warehouse where it archives material on behalf of Government, parastatals and the private sector.
The company was formed in April 2006 as a logical outflow of a former venture of managing a data system.
“In the long term we see a paperless office; the movement is on. Providing scanning services to businesses is the first tentative steps towards that,” Van Zijl said.
The company scans and indexes material of all sizes, and creates a digital records management system onsite and offsite, and archives clients’ material at their warehouse.
It works on two types of software, Rite File – created by the company and sold to clients – and MFile to track the archived items.
For safety reasons, the archived material is randomly stacked and not labelled by the names of the clients, but is tracked through a bar code, said Frans Bwalya, a consultant at the Documentation Warehouse.
The windowless warehouse holding the material has a fire detection system linked to the fire brigade, and limited light is used to preserve the paper copies of
material.