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Edinburgh city to digitise city drains maps
Date: 16/07/2008
Edinburgh local authorities are creating electronic maps of their city drains in a bid to help the planning for UK’s flood defences. Requests to local councils have been issued by the government so they can better prepare for potential flooding in advance.
It was recently stated in an expert review that floods around the country last year could have been prevented if better and more widespread knowledge of the local drainage systems was in place.
The process starting in Edinburgh involves digitising historic records with the aid of scanning and archiving. Along with preserving the records, it makes them available to many areas of the local authorities and will save around £25,000 a year. Any member of staff who requires the records can now access them from a single online point rather than requesting them from contractors, architects and utility firms.
Edinburgh’s authorities have now scanned and digitised 110,000 including ownership details dating back to 1875, these results have now been posted online. This will eventually meet the required standards which will help significantly in planning for flooding in the future.
The council has implemented the Captaris Alchemy document management system in 2007 in a joint project with Scottish Water. Avanquest host the Alchemy server and have given online access to these files. The only time period left to archive is from 2000 to 2004 but they are putting this into production as soon as they can
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