Choosing the Right Solution for the Czech Academy of Sciences

The Spisovka electronic filing service system was tested and adopted by the Masaryk Institute and the Head Office of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic on behalf of the entire Academy. Following its success in these institutions, Spisovka has been widely adopted by a growing number of state-funded institutions, public administration bodies, schools and municipalities. It has been chosen as the filing service system of choice in both large organisations with dozens or hundreds of employees and in small offices belonging to regional administrations.

 

The Academy’s success in finding a solution that complies with fast-changing laws as well as the Academy’s specific technical requirements helped to convince other organisations that this flexible and low-cost open source application provides a filing service solution that is superior to proprietary alternatives.

Electronic Filing Required by Law

Public institutions in the Czech Republic are required by law to operate and maintain a record management (filing) service. This is, by definition, a set of activities and technical or physical tools used for document management. Filing services allow proper administration of electronic and hard-copy documents, both internally generated and received from outside, throughout their respective life cycles.

With the advent of eGovernment and electronic solutions for the administrative needs of public bodies, the Czech Republic amended the relevant laws to reflect the new situation and brought in a requirement to operate electronic filing services.

Open Source Filing Service

When the time came for Czech public institutions and state-funded organisations to implement electronic filing (see below for an outline of the legislative framework), they could choose from a number of commercial, proprietary solutions, but only one open source application. The project to create an open source filing service was known as Spisovka, from the colloquial Czech word for a filing system. Spisovka was being developed by an organisation called OSS Alliance, which specialises in creating and supporting open source software under the patronage of the Ministry of the Interior.

The aim of the project was, and still is, to provide public and state administration bodies – municipalities, archives and other institutions – with a free-of-charge filing service application for a minimum of three years. Users of the application were guaranteed the right to access the source code, which they could further modify and distribute freely. The application was distributed free of charge under the GNU GPL licence (version 3). The software could be modified at will and integrated into existing IT infrastructures. Continuous development and regular updates based on user needs and potential new legislation were guaranteed for the duration of the project. The software is still being developed, even after the official end of the project.

Academy of Sciences The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic is an organisation whose chief mission is to conduct basic research. The Academy’s various institutes cover a broad range of sciences and humanities; their activities are highly specialised in relation to their specific fields of interest, while remaining universally adaptable to meet the needs of Czech society and the economy. The Academy of Sciences is active in Czech universities, fosters international collaboration, and strives to ensure that Czech science plays its part in the global scientific community and the European Research Area in particular. The state budget of the Czech Republic is the primary source of funding for the Academy of Sciences, but the Academy’s institutes also obtain funding from international grants and research programmes. The Academy makes wide use of target-oriented financing, which allows it to allocate funds for specific research projects on the basis of public competition. A Grant Agency established by the Academy of Sciences supports selected projects using a peer-review procedure which also involves foreign experts.

Masaryk Institute and Archive The Archive of the Academy of Sciences was established in 1953 along with the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. On 1 January 2006 the Archive was merged with the Academy of Sciences and its name changed to the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Academy of Sciences. The Institute’s uniqueness derives from the interdisciplinary overlap of its research spheres (particularly history, archive science, auxiliary historical disciplines, political science and literary history). It is engaged in research into the modern history of the Czech lands in the Central European context, with an emphasis on the legacy of the first two presidents of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia, Tomáš G. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, and the history of research institutes and researchers, as well as focusing on archive keeping and codicology. The Institute’s activities also include the receipt and processing of archive materials from the Academy’s establishments and from the activities of individual researchers. From the start, the Archive has worked as a controlling body within the state administration with regard to filing and discarding services in the institutions of both the former Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and, since 1993, the new Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

Electronic Filing Service at the Academy of Sciences

As early as the beginning of 2009, an electronic filing service was being considered by employees at three institutions of the Academy of Sciences: the Masaryk Institute and Archive, the Central Administration Office and the Head Office. Representatives of these institutions accordingly set up a working group tasked with researching and choosing the best solution.

The situation was complicated by the fact that the relevant legislation and regulations had not yet been passed. Staff at the Masaryk Institute realised that they lacked sufficient information. The team therefore spent the first three months of 2009 gathering information that would help them find their bearings in this somewhat unclear situation and make it simpler to define criteria for choosing the most suitable company to supply an electronic filing service application.

Employees of the Department of Institutional Funds, which is responsible, among other things, for overseeing the filing service of the Academy of Sciences, consulted a number of experts from selected archives in the Czech Republic and the Archiving Administration and Filing Service Department of the Ministry of the Interior. Their main interest was in proven companies recommended by the experts; emphasis was placed on experience with document management spanning the entire life cycle of documents, from creation, through processing, to shredding. Secure data storage was viewed as an indispensable part of this process.

Another precondition for the electronic filing service was to find out the current state of filing services and organisational structure across the individual institutions of the Academy of Sciences, which are distributed all over the country. This was done via a survey carried out from May to September 2009, the results of which formed the main building blocks on which further negotiations and processes were based. The survey provided the employees of the Archive with essential and up-to-date information on how the various document flows worked – including the numbers of document references to be handled and the number of recording points (nodes) – plus details of the organisational structure and number of employees at each institution.

The Academy of Sciences has over 50 institutes, approximately 9,000 employees, and more than 120,000 document reference numbers. The size of the individual institutes varies, with the largest employing 800 people and the second-largest 500. The average number of employees is around 100.

The problem remained that there was no way of knowing when and how many new laws affecting document management would be passed by the Czech parliament. This made it hard for the Archive team to specify the conditions of the tender that was being prepared at that time.

With this in mind, the Masaryk Institute set a basic condition: any electronic filing system would have to conform to all the relevant international standards (this requirement was later shown to be overly strict). In addition, it had to meet all the existing Czech laws, regulations and codes of practice governing archiving and filing services. At the same time, integration with the existing system had to be guaranteed in case new regulations applicable to electronic filing systems were published.

Choosing the Right Solution

The working group started by considering a centralised solution. The institutes of the Academy of Sciences already operated a central system for economic records, so the original plan was to integrate this with the new document management system. Data would be stored centrally, with careful separation of data from the individual institutes. The project would be set up and administered by the Central Administrative Office of the Academy.

The main problem with this approach was lack of funding. It was clear from the beginning that a commercial solution would be very demanding financially. The working group considered the possibility of EU funding to cover the implementation of the project, with the institutes using their own budgets to cover administration and training. However, there was no certainty of a grant, and in any case the Academy would have had to meet all the up-front costs.

This approach required contributions from the individual institutes as well.

Since the institutes are all independent legal entities, with a rather loose relationship to the Academy of Sciences, all the managers of the institutes would have had to agree to the project.

In September 2009 the managements of the individual institutes were informed of the available options and asked to choose either the central solution or their own system to be run in cooperation with the Archive. In view of the Academy’s unfavourable financial situation, the entire undertaking proved greatly unpopular. The institutes did not like the high cost of the project and feared that it would curtail their independence. Many of the institutes were reluctant to accept the central solution, and some rejected it completely, instead choosing to implement their own solutions. The existence of multiple electronic filing systems within the Academy was allowable, but it was clear that this approach would be more demanding for the employees of the Archive.

Preparing for Implementation

In view of the cost difficulties with commercial software, the open source solution seemed to present a viable and acceptable alternative. However, it was important to ascertain whether the programme would be suitable for all Academy of Sciences institutes. The original focus of Spisovka was on small municipalities and towns with fairly simple agendas and internal structures. The Academy of Sciences, on the other hand, may seem to be a compact, centralised organisation divided into departments (institutes) with a relatively high level of complexity – in which case the adoption of Spisovka would not make much sense. However, as has been said above, the law on public research institutions made it possible to loosen the ties within the Academy, such that the individual institutes are now independent units.

Another factor in favour of the open source solution was that academic institutions, considering the nature of their work, do not operate like regular offices. As a result, only the administrative employees would have to use the application. The researchers, who did not wish to work with the filing service in the first place, did not have to be part of the implementation process.

Considering the circumstances, and despite some pressure and hostility from the representatives of the vendors of proprietary electronic filing systems, the Masaryk Institute and the Head Office of the Academy decided to go ahead with Spisovka in the last quarter of 2009. All the Academy’s institutes were notified of the decision and given the choice of using the open source solution or implementing their own. All the institutes save one accepted the open source proposal. The Academy of Sciences thus became the first large customer of OSS Alliance who expressed a real interest in Spisovka.

A working group was established at the Department of the Development of eGovernment Projects and Services at the Ministry of the Interior, with the task of further developing the application and expanding its features related to filing services. The group was made up of experts from the Archiving Administration and Filing Service Department and representatives of the National Archive and regional and other archives, including the Masaryk Institute.

In December 2009 the Archive of the Academy of Sciences released an installation package to the institutes. To make the installation process easier, the Masaryk Institute team tailored the package to match the individual filing systems of the respective institutes.

Immediately afterwards, the Institute’s employees organised a series of twelve training sessions for the secretaries of the institutes and for the employees responsible for administering the filing service at the Academy’s Head Office. The training sessions were also attended by some IT technicians and managers at the institutes.

Launching the Service

The Archive then commenced the second stage of the project, which consisted in providing personal consulting on the deployment and operation of the application. The departments of the Head Office of the Academy tested the new filing service application throughout February 2010. It replaced the old paper filing notebooks on 1 March. The application was then deployed at the individual institutes for full-scale operation during the first six months of 2010.

During this stage, the Masaryk Institute team personally visited the institutes of the Academy of Sciences on more than 120 occasions. The team also dealt with a multitude of e-mail and phone inquiries.

The department’s employees used these visits to help with the practical aspects of using the application and with training other employees to work with the service. Based on the structure of the individual institutes, the team also fine-tuned the organisation of the filing system and helped to optimise the experience to suit the needs of each institute.

One of the issues encountered concerned the very diverse range of hardware and operating systems at the individual institutes. This caused installation problems in certain cases, as did the differing levels of expertise of IT technicians at the institutes. In view of the fact that the chief requirement was to provide the institutes with a free solution, including installation and deployment, both of these factors proved to be unexpectedly demanding of the Archive’s employees. The support provided by OSS Alliance and by IT technicians from some of the institutes proved to be invaluable in this regard. The Archive employees turned to them when necessary for advice on the technical requirements for installation.

The main obstacle to be overcome was the distrust shown by – mainly senior – administrative employees towards the entire concept of computerised filing. The filing offices at some of the institutes are staffed by women approaching retirement age who had never needed to work with computers at all before the introduction of the electronic filing service. As a result, the Archive employees sometimes needed to help them with even very basic computing tasks.

In a short time the practical use of the application resulted in feedback that suggested ways of improving the product. These were forwarded to both the working group at the Ministry of the Interior and to the application’s developers.

Using the Filing Service

Within the institutes of the Academy of Sciences it is usually the secretaries or IT technicians who serve as administrators and operate the filing systems. It is up to the individual institutes to choose how they set up their electronic filing systems, but the general rule is that the system is not accessible to all employees. At the majority of institutes, a single secretary has sole access to the application and performs all the activities associated with the filing service. Only the larger institutes have other administrative workers or managers using the application, depending on the nature of the institute. Mail is generally kept on file in the secretary’s office, which usually also functions as a filing and dispatch office, and central filing offices are seldom used. When they are, they still mostly function as distribution centres.

The filing service application is mostly used for computerised record-keeping. Digitised and electronic documents are not yet stored in the application as a matter of course, and the institutes have not yet started to use the connection between their e-mail inboxes and the data stores.

In conclusion, we can say that scientific institutions do not operate as classic office-oriented administration bodies. Administrative workers at research institutions are in the minority, and the nature of the researchers’ work is often so specific that as yet they have not started to make full use of the potential offered by the electronic filing service. Documents are still mostly printed and used in their physical form. For the most part, institutions share documents by e-mail or intranet instead of the electronic filing service. The full capacity of the system remains untapped as yet.

Use Outside the Academy

Following the successful pilot installation at the Academy of Sciences, Spisovka is now widely used in dozens of state-funded institutions, public administration bodies, schools and municipalities. It has been adopted as the filing service system of choice in both large organisations with dozens or hundreds of employees and in small offices belonging to regional administrations.

The Archive of the Academy has helped to implement the system at the National Gallery in Prague, one of the principal bodies administering state-owned art collections.

Other users of Spisovka include:

• The Moravian Library in Brno, whose four million volumes make it the second largest library in the Czech Republic.
• The Technology Agency of the Czech Republic.
• The Boskovice Gymnázium (grammar school) in Southern Moravia.

The Moravian Library in Brno

The Moravian Library is essentially a public research organisation whose main purpose is to carry out basic research, applied research and experimental development, and to disseminate the results by means of education, publications and technology transfer. It was founded in 1808 and now serves as a regional library for the region of Southern Moravia. It has valuable historical collections including old maps, early printed books, medieval manuscripts and old prints. The Moravian Library is also one of the many large libraries that use the open source Kramerius system to provide access to its digitised collections.

The Technology Agency of the Czech Republic

This agency plays a major role in the reform of the Czech Republic’s research, development, and innovation systems. The key feature of the reform is the redistribution of financial support from the national budget. The Technology Agency has simplified state support for applied research and experimental development, which previously was fragmented across many other funding bodies.

Unfortunately, political and commercial pressures have caused some organisations to stop using Spisovka for reasons that have nothing to do with user experience or valid technical concerns. The Boskovice grammar school is one example:

The Boskovice Gymnázium

The gymnasium used the Spisovka filing service from 2010 to 2013, until it was replaced by another filing-service application following an order from a supervisory body (the Regional Authority). Ms. Jaroslava Vitoulová, from the school office, had this to say about the choice of Spisovka and its eventual replacement:

Based on the legal requirement and a regulation issued by the school’s supervisory body, we had chosen the best possible filing service solution for our institution. Installation and other technical tasks were carried out by our ICT administrator in cooperation with the school’s director.

Employees were provided with a brochure with basic operating instructions. Despite the fact that changing to new software always takes time, we managed to overcome the initial difficulties rather quickly.

I was very satisfied with the filing service as provided by Spisovka. The software was fast, easy to use, and well designed. It greatly simplified the task of keeping our electronic filing diary.

Following another order from our supervisory body, the school now uses a different filing service application. While functional, the new software is much more complicated, and it takes longer to accomplish the same things. Whenever there is a need for information that is still kept in the Spisovka application or to edit old documents that have remained open, I wish I could go back to using Spisovka.

 

Spisovka has proved its ability to adapt to diverse conditions and to satisfy many wide-ranging requirements of organisations from a variety of different fields. The fact that the application is distributed with an open source licence makes it a natural choice for state-funded organisations because it is cost-effective, prevents vendor lock-in, and encourages reuse – not only of software but of good practices and experiences as well.

Legislative Framework

The first impulse for major legislative changes related to eGovernment in the Czech Republic was a government regulation from 2006 on a set of measures for accelerating the development of eGovernment in the Czech Republic. However, the law that established the initial legislative framework for the computerisation of the state administration was the Act on electronic operations and authorised document conversion, which came into effect on 1 July 2009. This addressed two key areas: data boxes (a specialised system for electronic mail exchange between the citizens and administration bodies) and authorised document conversion (a set of rules pertaining to conversions of hard-copy documents into electronic form). The law aimed to prepare optimal conditions for electronic communication between public administration bodies and citizens, and between different parts of the government.

Even with the basic pieces all in place, the actual process of computerising the state administration required a much more comprehensive approach. First of all, it was necessary to update the law covering archiving and filing services, plus several related regulations which defined the details of how filing services should be performed. The fact that the operation of filing services is mandated and regulated by law in the Czech Republic meant that specific procedures and principles had to be established before public institutions could begin to implement their own solutions.

The law passed in July 2009 was therefore followed by a number of explanatory regulations. Chief among these was the National Standard for Electronic Filing Service Systems, which stipulated basic requirements for functionality and created unifying parameters for the performance of filing services related to digital documents.

The amended law on archiving and filing services stated that public research institutions and state-controlled legal entities were obliged to do their filing electronically, using suitable filing service systems. These systems were required to be up and running by 1 January 2010 and to be handling all documents by 1 July 2010.

This was the framework that had to be considered when the Academy of Sciences was searching for an electronic filing service.

Authors

• Dr. Daniela Brádlerová studied archival science and works at the Archive of the Academy of Sciences as a researcher. She is the head of the Department of Institutional Funds. She specialises in the 20th-century history of Czechoslovak scientific institutions and scientific personalities, and in the history of the banking sector in the period between the world wars. She is also responsible for the filing service at the Academy of Sciences and for the accounts of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences.
• Vlasta Mádlová studied archival science and works at the Archive of the Academy of Sciences as a science and research expert. She specialises, among other things, in the history of Czechoslovak scientific institutions and personalities of Czechoslovak science in the 19th and 20th centuries. She supervises the filing and shredding services at the institutes of the Academy of Sciences and works on the adoption of the electronic filing service.
• Robert Krátký is an expert on open source software and the author of dozens of articles, with many years of experience in the field. Currently he works for Liberix, o. p. s., a Czech non-profit organisation specialising in the advancement of open source, as a coordinator and editor.