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Austin Community College Connects Six Campuses with PowerWeb

The steady rise in enrollment in community colleges across the United States can be attributed to the unique educational opportunities community colleges offer, including transferability of credit courses, vocational training and community service. Austin Community College, Austin, Texas, often overshadowed by Texas' flagship university, University of Texas at Austin, is nonetheless an impressive community college. ACC offers an accredited faculty; ACC's small class size facilitates more personalized learning, and the cost of attending classes is significantly lower than UT-Austin. In addition, all ACC class credits transfer to UT-Austin, and large numbers of students continue their education at UT-Austin after graduating from ACC.

One feature of a community college education that poses a challenge for administrators is an open door admissions policy. Like many community colleges, students do not have to reapply to attend ACC, no matter how many years pass between the time they withdraw from classes and the time they enroll again. This open door policy means administrators must manage thousands of inactive student records in the event they return to college. From an original enrollment of 1,793 students in 1972, the college has grown to more than 26,000 college credit students each fall, with nearly 18,000 additional enrollments during the year in continuing education programs.

ACC needed an updated system to meet the challenge of maintaining hundreds of thousands of student records. In addition, a law was passed in Texas that would further emphasize the value of document management to ACC staff.

Texas Government Code, Chapter 552, The Local Government Records Act was passed in 1989. Under its terms, The Texas State Library and Archives Commission developed standards and assisted records management programs for Texas' approximately 8,800 local governments and county offices. Designed to give Texans easy access government records, the Library and Archives Commission manages records retention schedules for state institutions like ACC. They ensure that state and local agencies adhere to the government records act, by responding to information requests in a timely manner and establishing reasonable procedures for inspecting or copying public information. This made efficient management of student records even more imperative for Austin Community College.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission trains state institutions on records retention and as part of that training, they recommend document imaging as a method of document storage. One would assume that a law mandating record retention would encourage businesses to invest in document imaging; however, ACC Manager of Student Records, Kay Barclay said microfilm is still the primary storage method that the commission recommends. Although challenging for document management companies who have tried to change they way organizations think about storing and managing archived records, ACC has found Fortis PowerWeb to be a key part of adhering to the document management standards set by the state.

ACC was using microfilm until 1992, when they started to become interested in document imaging. "The technology was new, so we waited to see what advances were being made in the industry," Barclay said. Westbrook Technologies' Fortis PowerWeb was introduced to ACC because of the college's burgeoning records issues, but also to address ACC's need to connect their six satellite campuses, all within a 20-mile radius in the metro Austin area.

In some instances, students attend classes at one campus, meet with advisors at another campus and perform evaluations at still another location. Administrators would have to spend tedious amounts of time to access a file by phone or fax or, even worse, travel to the central headquarters to retrieve an original document.

With their microfilm system, ACC's open door policy would wreak havoc if a new file needed to be added to an old record. "There's no way it can be done in microfilm - that's what is so wonderful about document imaging," Barclay said of Fortis PowerWeb's ability to annotate records, add files or redact documents. When students initially enroll at ACC, their master file is assigned a bar code number and from then on, anything scanned into Fortis PowerWeb related to that student is automatically indexed into their personal record.
With Fortis PowerWeb, more than 1.6 million pages of student records are managed and viewed by 140 ACC users. Registrar, Admissions and Business Administration staff rely on Fortis PowerWeb to retrieve permanent student records, including:

• State residency forms
• Applications
• Other college transcripts
• High school transcripts

Each campus compiles 30 boxes of paper over the course of the semester, and at the end of the semester are sent to the central campus where they are scanned in at the rate of 3,000 sheets per day. One full-time employee and two part-time employees add documents to the system daily. Barclay estimates that it takes eight weeks to scan in the prior semester's documents, approximately 30 boxes full of paper.

"There are die-hard microfilm people out there, but the quality and accessibility of document imaging is far greater than anything microfilm could offer," Barclay said. As Fortis PowerWeb expands to include the human resources and auditing departments, college administrators are able to adhere to records management laws and improve their internal processes as well.

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