Assignment: Interview Records Entity and Report
Introduction
Small non-profit organizations have interested me lately because I am intrigued by how
they function and accomplish their mission often without “top-of-the-line” professional staff, adequate financial backing, or much public visibility. They tend to rely on the skills and knowledge of people who are dedicated to a particular cause and willing to work for less or no salary. Yet, they still have very similar records and information management needs as larger, more financially stable and professionally operated organizations. For this reason, I chose to study and report on such an entity.
they function and accomplish their mission often without “top-of-the-line” professional staff, adequate financial backing, or much public visibility. They tend to rely on the skills and knowledge of people who are dedicated to a particular cause and willing to work for less or no salary. Yet, they still have very similar records and information management needs as larger, more financially stable and professionally operated organizations. For this reason, I chose to study and report on such an entity.
Background
The Family History Center in Crystal Lake, Illinois (CLFHC) was established in 1998. It is an affiliate location, or extension, of the Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are several thousand such centers around the world. The CLFHC, like all family history centers, is a non-profit organization that is managed and staffed entirely by volunteers. There is a Center Director, an Assistant Director and about 16 Family History Consultants on staff. Their expressed mission is to assist CLFHC patrons with family history research and organization of vgenealogical data.
The primary service offered is access to the 2.5 million rolls of microfilm at the Family History Library. Patrons can use the website www.FamilySearch.org to search for their ancestor’s key genealogical information (birth, marriage, or death records) which has been microfilmed and preserved by the LDS Church. When this search leads to a microfilmed record, aCLFHC patron can borrow the appropriate micro film by completing a film order form[1] and paying a small fee. The film order is processed by Church Distribution, a warehousing and shipping center for church materials in Salt Lake City, Utah. The microfilm roll is sent to the CLFHC. When the patron is finished with the film, it is returned to Church Distribution. If the patron chooses to renew the film, it remains in the CLFHC for another loan period, and a second renewal makes it an extended loan and it remains in the CLFHC indefinitely.
The CLFHC is located in two small rooms in a local meeting house of the LDS Church, a main room and an auxiliary room that is used only when patron volume requires it. The equipment on site includes four personal computers and two microfilm readers in the main room and five additional microform readers in the auxiliary room. There is also a microfilm reader/printer, a photocopier and a computer printer and several microform storage cabinets. There is barely enough space for four or five patrons at a time, with overflow space for another 4 or 5 patrons in the auxiliary room. The CLFHC is generally open about 23 hours per week.
While this information center is part of a much larger operation, -- the Family History Library is in fact the largest repository of genealogical records in the world -- the local centers are relatively small operations and have simple records and information management programs. An all-volunteer staff leads to some specialized operational needs in their RIM program. The Center Director met with me to discuss that program and current practices, as well as some of the records management challenges.
Summary of current records and information practices
The director maintains operational records that include shift reports, film order cards, church distribution invoices[2], patron data files, staff data files, and financial records. These are the records that effectively support the CLFHC’s activities, just as described by ARMA International’s GARP[i]. But, the most important records managed by this entity are the more than 1,200 rolls of microfilm that are maintained locally and are available to the patrons who borrowed them.
When a film is ordered, it arrives about a week later at the director’s home. The patron is called and informed that it is available, and the film is placed, according to call number order, in the storage cabinets at the CLFHC. The patron comes and uses the film at their convenience, and the film is kept in the film cabinet, since it is not allowed out of the CLFHC.
After a film is no longer needed by the patron who requested it, the film is returned. For a smaller fee than the original loan request, the patron may renew the loan if the initial period is not long enough to obtain the genealogical data desired. After two renewal periods, the film is retained in the CLFHC becoming an “extended loan”.
Additionally, some records are available only on microfiche. These records are ordered in the same way as microfilm. I won’t go into detail here about the patron, staff, invoice, and financial records, but these are paper documents in paper file folders.
Technologies and techniques employed in management of records
Management of films is done through Inventory Manager, software which links the CLFHC to Church Distribution. From Inventory Manager, the local center director may request, renew, extend, and mark as returned all film loans processed on behalf of center patrons. The Inventory Manager software also produces reports of the films in all of these status categories.
A patron completes an order card and delivers it to a staff member. The order is entered into Inventory Manager and the card is filed for future reference. Loan fees are collected and recorded on a shift report spreadsheet. The money is used to cover postage for sending films back to Church Distribution, and office supplies. When a new patron registers to use films, that individual’s information is entered into Inventory Manager.
If a film loan is extended, the order card is retained as a permanent record. Otherwise, a year after the film is returned, the cards are removed and destroyed. For extended loans, the card is used to create a local reference tool (a binder containing the list of extended loan films), which is used to find films by world geographic location and/or subject. The need may arise for other patrons to use these extended loan films and they are made available to them in this way.
Church Distribution creates an invoice record and emails a scanned copy to the director. These records are matched with monthly financial statements to link deposits with film loan entries on invoices to verify that the fees were collected and deposited. The money is swept weekly from the CLFHC’s bank account by Church Distribution based on the loan invoices.
A weekly deposit record is made based on the weekly shift[3] report produced by the center director. This weekly shift report is a roll-up of the daily shift reports completed by staff at the end of each shift. The shift reports are created in Microsoft Excel and are used to keep track of the number of patron visits, copies made, films ordered, renewed, extended, etc. and the associated fees collected on a shift. The reports are printed and filed for later reconciliations between bank account statements and the church distribution invoices. This requires considerable manual activity in handling and reporting transactions. Recently, the CLFHC began using a new software program to manage the bank account and report transactions. This permits an electronic transmission of deposit totals each day, whereas previously this was transferred via modem after the weekly shift report and banking deposit slip were prepared.
Effectiveness Evaluation
The shift report is actually a very simple tool and most staff members have enough familiarity with Microsoft Excel to be able to complete the report during the shift with very little training. The key is for the staff to remember to complete the spreadsheet for each individual transaction and save it as a new file with a new date, which becomes the file name. If the file is saved and the money that has been collected is reconciled at the end of the shift with the shift report, then financial record keeping is quite easy and smooth.
The microform order cards are collected and the director, or a designee, enters the orders for loan requests into Inventory Manager. In one respect this is not very efficient, because only one or two people are capable of entering the orders. On the other hand, Inventory Manager is not an intuitive user-friendly tool, and too much training may be required to spend the time necessary to train a volunteer, who may only work at the CLFHC for a few months time. One aspect of this process that is challenging is that the ordering mechanism in Inventory Manager is very exacting, particularly when ordering Microfiche and is different from the process of ordering microfilms. It is sometimes confusing for staff members how to enter the order information for microfiche and has developed into improper ordering situations in the past and ultimately, unhappy patrons. It is challenging to keep a “temporary” volunteer staff up-to-speed on all of the procedures. Some of the staff are not able, or choose not, to attend a monthly staff meeting, due to the extra time commitment. This means that a good number of the staff do not have the knowledge necessary to fulfill some of the more intricate records management functions. That leaves a heavy burden for one or two individuals, usually the director and a designated individual.
The CLFHC does not use a written procedures manual. Processes have changed over the years and the manual was not revised. Writing those procedures more explicitly and sharing it with the staff may help to eliminate some of the procedural confusion.
The director recommended I speak with one member of the CLFHC staff. This staff member is an organization consultant, who assists individuals and businesses to organize their records and processes. In a telephone conversation with this staff member, another area of concern was discussed. When a film order card is received, the staff does not use Inventory Manager and are not warned that the film may already be in the CLFHC. The only other way to know that is to look in the cabinet for the film by call number. If the patron does not look and the staff member forgets or does not know to look, then an order card is unnecessarily completed and a fee must be refunded later. If it were known that the film was already on site, the waiting period and the fee would be avoided. The staff member indicated that this has happened occasionally and a patron has asked, “Why didn’t you tell me it was here?”, when the duplicate film roll was discovered in the cabinet later.
Again, a written step-by-step instruction sheet would help the staff avoid this error in the process.
A third area of concern expressed by the director involves the semi-annual audits of the CLFHC’s records. The director has very little time to reconcile each week’s shift reports with the Church Distribution shipping invoices and the monthly bank statement, and finds that the reconciliations are grossly behind when the auditor calls to schedule an audit. A significant amount of time must be spent getting ready for these audits, because so many months are reconciled at once. A procedure using someone on staff to do the reconciliations on a monthly basis would alleviate the burdensome workload when six months of records are reconciled at one time.
Lastly, there seems to be an extensive amount of manually filling out paper forms and filing them. There is very little space for the paper anyway. The inventory manager software ought to provide enough of a record to be able to keep track of the various transactions. Perhaps the volunteer staff and director are still tied to a paper environment and don’t see the possibilities of using the electronic tools to their fullest capabilities. The reconciliation process, for one, could become more streamlined if electronic tools were engaged more fully and if the director were less dependent on paper files.
Summary
The Crystal Lake Family History Center is a very small entity with huge impact in the lives of its patrons, as they fulfill deeply seated desires to explore family and genealogical relationships. The processes followed are simple, and for the most part, efficient and effective. There are really only a few instances where procedural inefficiencies were detected in this study, and those instances were minor and occur infrequently, and will be easily resolved through more clearly defined procedural guidelines and greater use of technology. The overall records and information management program is dictated, to some extent, by a larger organization with significant background and experience with the processes deployed in the CLFHC. It is safe to say that this small volunteer-staffed entity benefits greatly from this affiliation. The program is comprehensive and does not face many of the regulatory and legal implications for most organizations, but privacy issues and retention standards for pertinent records are understood and addressed in the program.
The “all volunteer” organization depends on the experience and knowledge that its volunteers gain elsewhere, because there simply isn’t enough human resource power to do everything that is required. So training is lacking and personal knowledge and experience have to make up for it. These conditions are true for the CLFHC, and in spite of these minor challenges, the CLFHC does a remarkable job managing a sizeable volume of transaction records.
[i] Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles Preamble, ARMA International. https://courses.lis.illinois.edu/file.php/1014/garp.pdf, accessed 7/22/2010
