sds Heritage - preserving Britain's heritage
About sds Heritage our work
why use our services?
There are several key advantages to using sds Education to convert your student records to CD-ROM:
15,000 Sheets of paper/Student files on a single CD-ROM
Protect all your records for perpetuity in one format and in one place
Print out any page from any file within seconds
Free up and make other uses for existing storage rooms, filing cabinets, ring binders, et cetera
Secure copies of all your documents
Easier, faster, and more efficient access to your archives
Never mislay or wrongly file a document again
Paper in general discolours and deteriorates over a period of time. This does not happen with electronic data
sds Education keep additional back up copies of every CD-ROM produced for yourselves, in fire proof safes at secure locations (should you ever damage or mislay your own copies)
Colour scans of student photographs (if available) are made the first page within the electronic folder for each student
Once the records have been converted to an image on the CD-ROM, it is simple to search and retrieve them, because we are able to provide a comprehensive indexing system that can also be tailored to suit your specific needs
Thumbnail images will also exist for every page of every document, enabling the user to go straight to a particular page by sight, within a particular electronic binder
You are able to have full indexing of records, enabling a search by student name or year of entry
We are able to mirror your existing manual storage system exactly, or even improve upon it

software solution one - adobe acrobat
Simple hierarchical / linear system, alphabetically listed by surname, with simple hot-link functionality for the following fields:
Name
Permanent/Parent's Address
Date of Birth
Entry Year
advantages
No minimum order value
Independently CD-ROM based
Have different CD-ROMs for different years/courses et cetera
Mac OS and Windows XP/Vista compatible
User-friendly image manipulation/control
disadvantages
Only simple search facility
Mainly useful for a hierarchical storage mechanism
software solution two - sds navigator™
A Visual Basic/Microsoft Access solution, with Microsoft-friendly fields identical to that of the Adobe Acrobat system above. OLE linked to multi-page TIFF/PDF documents.
advantages
Standard database functionality
Multiple search and filtering
Database queries form view or table view of data
Ascending and descending sort on data
Will work across Internet/Network/Server/CD-ROM
Extremely scaleable
Can be linked to other databases
disadvantages
Not compatible with Mac OS (Windows only)
software licensing
The Acrobat viewing software will be supplied to you free of charge. This enables you to install the software on as many computers within the institution as you desire, with no financial penalties. There are no annual maintenance costs involved either. The only costs involved for the whole project from sds Education, are the costs of scanning and indexing your paper/electronic archives.

However, the complexity of the skills, quality controls and range of high speed, expensive in-house equipment required to provide the product, should not be underestimated. For a tailor-made, more elaborate solution, the sds Navigator is recommended (see "solution two", left). This is more searchable and can link in with other in-house databases. However, there is a one-off cost for this particular software.
Corporate partners:
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