The Orissa High Court has initiated a move to preserve 200-years-old legacy records (disposed of records) for posterity.
“Records aging more than two centuries are preserved there and there is a proposal for consulting historians and facilitating them to study such records and research on the evolution of State judiciary”, the HC registry informed in an official statement on Saturday.
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There are records that are in such fragile condition that those can not undergo the process of scanning. Such records are permanently preserved in a separate room called a fragile record room.
The already existing legacy records in physical form are being digitized in the High Court’s Record Room Digitization Centre (RRDC).
Record keeping is an important component of office management in every organization. Judicial institutions are no exception to it. From the Supreme Court at the National level to the Courts at the Taluka level, thousands and lakhs of cases are filed every day and nearly equal numbers of cases are disposed of. Huge numbers of records are generated on a daily basis in the shape of new filings in physical form. The disposed of case records are stored safely in the Record Rooms of the respective Courts.
The High Court of Orissa was established in 1948. Being a Court of Record it had to ensure that its legacy records (disposed of records) were stored and preserved securely and that access to such records remained convenient and less time-consuming for posterity.
Additionally, with more and more legacy records being consigned to the record rooms regularly, solutions had to be found for managing space within these record rooms. On average, more than one lakh cases are filed and about 85,000 cases are disposed of in the High Court every year, the statement added.