Dayna Camilleri Clarke met with leading CEO Carlo Stivala from ARChives International, to find out more about his innovative company.
Briefly, what does Archives International do?
Archives International provides cutting edge holistic digitisation services whereby physical documents are scanned using state of the art OCR technology, which transfers images to digital data. Archives also offer other functions which are applied during scanning, such as searchability, data capturing, and indexing. We also offer our own DMS (Document Management System) Software which is an important software used to organise and manage document filing.
How many pages per minute do your scanners copy?
We invested in high-tech American equipment which scans documents from an average speed of 400 to over 900 pages per minute on dual format at high resolution. Our German software then does the foldering and sub-foldering during scanning.
How does your system transfer physical filing to digital filing?
Once the documents are scanned using our high-tech scanners and software, physical documents are transferred to digital documents creating metadata onto servers. On the server, extra software add-ons generate the services requested by the client are performed on the data.
Are your clients mainly in the public or private sector, or both?
Both. We offer our services to small and medium-sized businesses starting from small shops, audit and accountants, notaries and lawyers, to large industries, banks and government entities.
I understand that ARChives International is a partnership with a German mother company. Can you elaborate and perhaps mention some of the companies you have worked within Germany?
Archives International Ltd is a partnership between a Maltese investor and InfoScan Gmbh which is the leading digitisation company in Germany with over 15 years of experience. Currently or in the past InfoScan has done projects for the German Income Tax Department, Daimler Mercedes, German public and private hospitals, Bosch, Sparkasse Bank, Fiat Chrysler Automobil, Otis, VolksBank, to mention a few.
There might be those who would be concerned about the security and confidentiality of their documents. How do you address these concerns? Do you cater for clients who for security and other reasons, would prefer to scan their documents at their own premises?
With each client, Archives International finalises ad-hoc GDPR agreements which will include all terms and conditions regulating data security and confidentiality. We implement rigid internal rules whereby no mobile phones or other photographic equipment be allowed on our premises to all of our employees.
Archives offer digitisation services from its premises in Corradino and provide the possibility to scan at the client’s site. This is usually requested by clients who have sensitive information and whose documents cannot be transported. In these cases, our equipment has to be temporarily installed at clients’ premises where the digitisation process will be affected.
What happens to the documents once they are scanned, given that some of your clients would still want to keep them while others may not?
Archives offer the possibility to store data on our servers and/or shredding services and/or document storage services. Some of our clients request that their files are to be returned after the digitisation project is affected.
We, therefore, offer the possibility to recompose the files as they were originally handed over to us.
We would like to end this interview by explaining our mission statement:
“We all generate paper documents daily which are then filed in stores/archives in some cases up to 10 years or even longer, and we all need to access data quickly. Digitisation is the only way to access data and drastically reduces document storage.
Data is required in our everyday life whether it is required for personal, business, statistical or health use and must be accessed without the need to handle, carry or store paper documents. The only way forward is digitisation. How can employees access documents when working remotely? We have to think about remote access of documents and increasing data searchability by using digitisation techniques with the final aim of reducing the use of paper.”