Since 1988, Diane Hopkins has been working in various capacities at the World Bank, always associated with the department responsible for institution-wide archives and records management services. In 1993, the World Bank formed an inter-disciplinary team to design and develop an electronic document management system (EDMS) using standard information engineering methodology. Diane represented archival and end user interests on the design team. She also established the data administration function for the project and performed usability testing of the EDMS prototype. The IRIS system currently operating is limited to capturing images (and corresponding OCR text) of finished documents. Clive Smith is now the data administrator, and is working on integration of Lotus Notes (electronic mail messages and other documents) with IRIS. Diane currently reports to Clive, and manages the database for document type metadata that drives various document profile attributes in the IRIS system. The World Bank is rapidly accumulating a corpus of multilingual records in electronic format. During the EDMS project and subsequently as the Bank implements the IRIS system, it has followed closely and tried to apply the theoretical work of various researchers attending the Working Meeting. Amongst the many practical problems the Bank faces in deploying the system across a large, globally decentralized enterprise, it believes that the following topics would benefit from research at this stage:
16 June 1997