System and method for managing information retrievals for integrated digital and analog archives on a global basis

#The present invention generally relates to systems and methods for electronic information retrieval and more particularly to systems and methods for retrieving information from logically and geographically distributed and incompatible storage devices containing both digital and analog content.

#Historically, corporations have used paper, microfilm and microfiche media for the long term storage of information important to the corporation. Each of these types storage media can take massive amount of physical storage space, and require considerable effort when the retrieval of stored information is necessary. Such media are still widely in use, both for historical and current archiving of information. Electronic storage archives have been developed that enable large electronic repositories that facilitate relatively easy retrieval of electronic files. Typically, these electronic storage archives allow the long term archival of document bitmap images, computer generated reports, office documents (e.g., word processing documents and spreadsheets), audio and video files, etc.

#The hardware typically incorporated in an electronic archive is comprised of a general purpose computer and storage devices (such as magnetic disks, optical disks and magnetic tape subsystems). The hardware is typically operated and accessed by software comprising an operating system, database management systems, hierarchical storage management software (HSM) and archive management software. There are at least four significant limitations associated with current long term archival systems. First, larger corporations will invariably require several geographically diverse heterogenous archival systems in order to support the various operations of the corporation throughout the country and the world. For example, The corporation's research and development facility in London England has a separate archival system from the archival system for one of the corporation's manufacturing sites in Dallas Texas. Even if each of the archive facilities has a heterogeneous archival (e.g., a database manager) the hardware and the software comprising the archival at the two sites is invariably provided by two different vendors whose proprietary product are not interoperable (i.e., the software at the London site cannot be used to access the information stored at the Dallas site).

#For the purposes of illustrating the present invention, there is shown in the drawings a form which is presently preferred, it being understood however, that the invention is not limited to the precise form shown by the drawing in which:

#FIG. 1 depicts a high level diagram illustrating the components of the archive manager of the present invention;

#FIG. 2 illustrates the main component parts of the archive access manager of the present invention;

#FIG. 1 illustrates, at a high level, the system of the present invention and its relationship with respect to the electronic archives 100-106 of a enterprise and with respect to users 150, 160 of those archives. Illustrated in FIG. 1 are six different archives. Archives 100 and 102 represent domestically located archives while archive 104 is located in Europe. Element 106 represents analog archives. Although only six archives 100-106 are depicted in this Figure, the present invention is scalable such that the access to any number of electronic archives can be managed by the present invention. The archives 100-106 are heterogenous in configuration meaning that they are constructed of diverse constituent elements (e.g., hardware and software) and store a wide diversity of types of information.

#Schematically included in each of the archives 100-104 are the physical storage devices 110, the software 112 for accessing the physical devices 110, the site specific software 114 for controlling access to archived information, and site specific messaging system 116 for communication with a site. Typical storage devices 102 include Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD), optical storage devices and magnetic tape devices. These storage devices are typically configured in a hierarchical manner such that information that is more recent or that is more often accessed is stored on devices with the quickest access time, for example DASD. Using conventional archiving techniques, as electronic information “ages”, it is migrated for archival purposes from DASD to devices with a slower access time such as optical disks or magnetic tape. Optical disks and tape provide a cost effective means for the storage of large quantities of electronic information. Tapes are typically stored and accessed through tape silos while a large quantity of optical disks are stored and accessed from one or more jukeboxes. Some specific examples of storage devices 110 include IBM and EMC magnetic disks, STK magnetic tape silos, Boxhill RAID magnetic disks, and Hewlett Packard magneto-optical jukeboxes.

#Device 106 represents an analog storage device. Such a device includes microfilm, microfiche and ion beam etched devices. For the purposes of information retrieval with respect to the present invention, these devices broadly fall into two types of categories, those with a digital index and those without.