Accommodating Paper in Document Databases Majed AbuSafiya Subhasish Mazumdar Computer Science Dept New Mexico Tech Socorro NM 87801 USA Computer Science Dept New Mexico Tech Socorro NM 87801 USA majed nmt edu mazumdar nmt edu ABSTRACT Keywords Although the paperless office has been imminent for decades documents in paper form continue to be used extensively in almost all organizations Present day information systems are designed on the premise that any paper document in use will be either converted into electronic form or merely printed from electronic file s accessible to the system Yet paper is the medium of choice in many situations mainly owing to its portability and usability and the medium of necessity in others especially where external communication or the traditional notion of authenticity are involved Humans who find unique attractive features in both paper and electronic forms of documents must survive this tension between the de jure banishment of paper and its de facto prevalence In this paper we propose to make paper documents first class citizens by including them in the model underlying the information system Specifically we extend the schema of a document database with the notion of paper documents physical locations and the organizational hierarchy This leads to an overall enhancement of document integrity and the ability to answer queries such as where are the customer complaint letters we have received today and which documents are in this filing cabinet Recent technological advances such as sensors have made the implementation of such a model very realistic Document Databases Document Management Paper Documents Paper Manifestation RFID Enterprise Document Model 1 INTRODUCTION Great advances in electronic information technology have made the creation storage and flow of electronic documents not only feasible but economical and consequently have led to great increases in productivity Yet paper documents exist in virtually every office and are involved in most business processes There are some intrinsic advantages of paper documents over their digital counterparts 4 they are easier to work with especially when large they require little technological infrastructure for reading and writing they are portable and easier to annotate Electronic versions of documents on the other hand offer superior search storage and transfer capabilities An important source of paper in an enterprise is the outside world Customers suppliers and stakeholders send information on paper which are examined filtered i e some are discarded routed and acted upon in paper form before some subset is converted into digital files Within the organization paper documents result from printouts of files created and stored digitally such printouts are used not only for perusal but also for annotation routing and signature In addition a substantial amount of information is sent out from the enterprise to the external world in paper form Some documents are deemed to be authentic only in paper form they are certificates or proofs of some event claim or promise hence they must be archived in paper Categories and Subject Descriptors H 4 1 Information Systems Applications Office Automation H 1 m Models and Principles Miscellaneous I 7 1 Document and Text Processing Document and Text Editing Document Management I 7 5 Document and Text Processing Document Capture Computerized information systems have typically presumed that all important documents are in electronic form This has resulted in a second class citizenship for paper documents in the sense that operations on them are invalid until and unless they are coerced into electronic form by scanning typing or keying The belied premise that paper documents will go away has led to their uncomfortable co existence with electronic document repositories For the workers the consequence is tension and inefficiency as they strive to live a double life both among official electronic documents and an unofficial world of paper documents Our solution is to make paper documents first class citizens in the document database of the enterprise General Terms Design Management Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page To copy otherwise to republish to post on servers or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and or a fee DocEng 04 October 28 30 2004 Milwaukee Wisconsin USA Copyright 2004 ACM 1 58113 938 1 04 0010 5 00 155 In order to recognize the de facto status of paper a simple solution is to keep track of paper documents on a computer database But managing and accounting for paper documents is hard First they are mobile they move from one employee to another and from one office to another in the organization Second paper documents come in various shapes and sizes and when accumulated make searching quite difficult Traditionally these problems were dealt with by aggregating papers in folders indexing and storing them in file cabinets But even indexing becomes very hard when we have a very large collection of documents and cabinets along with a heavy flow of new documents Third operations on paper documents are error prone Since they are managed and processed by humans errors are as expected quite common they are misplaced sent to the wrong person operations on them are skipped and they fall into the wrong hands In addition we would like the ability to answer queries like which paper documents are residing in a location such as a file cabinet and also ask which documents are missing there By adopting an enterprise aware comprehensive model we can do more than simply search for a document or alert when a particular document arrives Our model supports integrity constraints that assert that paper documents should be in the right place at the right time as also that they are not under the control of the wrong persons In addition it makes it feasible to trigger workflows based on paper documents In addition to monitoring the check in and check out of the paper documents from physical locations the model also supports the logging of incremental changes applied to those documents this primarily includes signatures and annotations This paper is structured as follows The next section explains our approach by explaining our