What is the object of the project?

The object of the Project “Digitalisation and Development of an Integrated Information System for the management, retention, disposal and highlighting of the archives safe-kept at the General State Archives” relates to the digitalisation of the archives of the General State Archives, the migration of this digital data to an integrated information system, as well as the supply of all necessary infrastructure (Data Centres and local infrastructure), in combination with the appropriate software development and support services.

The Project “Digitalisation and Development of an Integrated Information System for the management, retention, disposal and highlighting of the archives safe-kept at the General State Archives” will be implemented through, in particular, (indicative list) the following actions:

• Digitalisation of approximately 55,000,000 pages of Α3/Α4/A2/A1/A0 size, from the archives of the General State Archives (Central and Regional Services), documentation (metadata import), development of a thesaurus of terms and classification of all the digital material.
• Services for the migration of informational data from existing systems, and archiving of all the digital material (produced by the digitalisation and then by the migration), its organisation and storage at a Relational Database System.
• Redesign and simplification of the individual procedures that are the object of the project, modeling and design of an Operational Model that include the procedure to be simplified.
• Development of an Integrated Information System for the management, retention, disposal and highlighting of the archives safe-kept at the General State Archives with development of an application for the provision of digital services for the support of the simplification of the procedure. The system will offer electronically the processes of search and disposal of archival documents for research purposes (with full and open access for the archives that are not subject to legal or other access restrictions) and for the citizens’ personalized and secure access to archive material, to serve the citizens’ legitimate interests and rights (through an application for the submission and management of the requests).
• Creation of a portal, through which digital services of Information, Search and Retrieval of Archives – Submission of Disposal Request will be provided to the public.
• Supply and installation of the necessary equipment and software.
• Other Services (Current Situation Recording Study, Security Study, Study on the Interoperability with third systems, Feasibility Study, Training, Publicity Actions).

What are the objectives of the project?

The general objectives of the Project are the expansion of digitalisation of the archive material safe-kept and managed by the services of the General State Archives (G.S.A), with a focus on the archives that have the greatest demand from the general public (businesses and citizens), as well as the digital transformation through the development and provision of digital end-to-end services, internally and with all the transactors.

The specific objectives of the project are :

a) The increase in digital services and in the functionality of indexing and search in archives, in such a way that the following are feasible :

• The maximum utilisation of the information contained in the archive material managed by the General State Archives (G.S.A) by the businesses and the citizens
• The utilisation of the state of the art indexing and search technologies in data and metadata of the archive collections

(b) The shaping of an effective environment to receive and process archive management requests. The Information System of the General State Archives (G.S.A) aims to provide the critical services that the General State Archives (G.S.A) require for the total accomplishment of their mission, aiming at:

• the faster service and burden reduction of the transactors;
• the provision of digital automated services, which will meet the requirements and expectations of the transactors;
• the upgrade of the internal operation of the Organization and the quality of work for the senior officials of the General State Archives (G.S.A);
• the significant resource savings and reduction of the overall administrative costs of the body and the other public bodies that deal with the General State Archives (G.S.A), to the taxpayer’s benefit;
• the reorganisation and improvement of the functionality of the List of Archives and Collections of the General State Archives (G.S.A) – Digital Repository ,which has an key role in the organisation of the effective mission of the General State Archives (G.S.A);
• the organisation of the internal and external interoperability of the General State Archives (G.S.A), with a quite large number of external links of Production Bodies, Public Organisations and Services, etc.

The Information System under development is requested to achieve the efficient management of the functional requirements, using handling flows of procedures/cases. It must cover all procedures/cases and work flows, which summarise and organise the total critical and representative procedures that handle the organisational and functional object of the services of the General State Archives (G.S.A). To this end, it will standardise audits and audit trails and it will essentially organise and insert into the procedures and the standards, the knowledge and the operative content of the services of the General State Archives (G.S.A) involved.

The specific operational objectives of the project are as follows:

Objective 1: The increase of the users that will use the digital services to obtain copies, will continue at a higher pace because of the technological progress and the citizens’ shift to and familiarisation with digital services.

Objective 2: The digitalisation of approximately 55,000,000 pages of documents of the General State Archives (G.S.A)/archive material, which will be made available to the public.

Today, approximately 7,360,000 archive pages are in digital format. Upon completion of the Project, at least 65 million pages of archive material with valuable information are sought to be available to the citizens in digital format.

Objective 3: The digitalisation and documentation of approximately 55,000,000 pages of documents of the General State Archives (G.S.A)/archive material of the General State Archives (G.S.A).

Objective 4: The creation of metadata for the search of documents of the General State Archives (G.S.A) and the archive wealth to be digitalised in the context of the project. In the event that existing search metadata for archive collections are recorded with incomplete data, these may become processing data in the context of the project (to be evaluated at the implementation study).

Objective 5: The simplification and digital automation pf the operational processes of the General State Archives (G.S.A). (1, tracking, 2. search, 3. printing, 4. sending and 5. service automation of the I.I.S.) will guarantee the conditions to achieve the objectives 5 and 6.

Objective 6: The acceleration of time and procedures of tracking the desirable data of archive material over the Internet.

Objective 7: The acceleration of handling of the request of the public to issue copies.

What are the expected benefits from the implementation of the project?

In view of the above, the expected benefits form the implementation of the Project are:

1. Development and upgrade of the services offered by the General State Archives (G.S.A) to the citizen / transactor, through faster, easier and more secure access to the digital information and faster information search.
2. Saving resources and working time for the officials of the General State Archives (G.S.A) with parallel increase in efficiency and better utilisation of the staff, as the digitalisation of the material will lead to the decrease in the movement of physical archives, and, therefore, of the working time of the respective staff, as well as the significant improvement of the communication and the work flow of the Central to the Regional Services
3. Saving and preserving the valuable archive material from natural disasters and from the wear and tear of time.
4. Reduction of operating costs for reproduction of information from original material, without, at the same time, the risk of its destruction.
5. Better service of the transactors with better control and faster handling in the movement of information, through automated systems for the search, retrieval and processing that optimises the classic manual methods.
6. More effective exchange of information with other bodies with a similar object, as well as with foreign services.