Managing engineering, architectural, and cartographic drawings: because drawings will continue to be important information sources for most organizations, managing them will continue to be a great opportunity for RIM professionals.

• Author: Jones, Virginia A.
• Position: Business Matters - Records and Information Management

Engineering, architectural, and cartographic drawings are graphical means of communicating information about objects, structures, or places that show how the subjects will look when completed, and thus play an important part in organizations' mission-critical processes and functions. Traditionally, the key factors in drawing practices that affect records and information management (RIM) methodology have been media, layout, quality, size, and use, each of which has corresponding national, international, and, often, internal standards with which to comply.

Because a drawing's core value lies in its graphical depiction of information, its layout and quality are of key importance. Some drawings include several views of the same object, structure, or place, either inset on the same page or spread over several pages. In the latter case, keeping all the pages together is important to preserve the drawing's context. This is fairly easy to achieve with bound hardcopy media, but in electronic format requires knowledge of all the pages (or views) available. To maintain context, each drawing page must be labeled with consistent identifiers as well as the sheet or page number. Other information factors that affect drawing management are:

* Notes: textual information specifying details not conveyed graphically, such as engineering notes, field notes, or parts specifications

* Accurate scale measurement: important because duplication, printing from electronic drawings, magnifying and printing from microfilm, and printing from scanned images can easily distort graphical dimensions and relationships

* Title block information: contains identifiers, such as drawing number, project name, object name, drawing author, and date, which serve as the source for capturing data used to index both original drawings and their microfilmed or scanned images [See Figure 1 on page 57.]

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

* Revision block information: shows revision dates, authors, and tracking references, which is important for tracking edits and for version control; may also be used for indexing in a document management system [See Figure 2.]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In electronic formats, data in the title block and the revision block provide the identification and tracking metadata for the drawing.

Good drawing quality is essential for accuracy. Difficult-to-read lines or figures can create chaos during construction, manufacture, natural resource location, or navigation. Thus, most drawing quality standards set requirements for line and character thickness, legible printing, consistent colors and ink tone and, for hardcopy originals, pen or pencil lead weight. [See "Drawing Quality Standards" on page 58.] Quality standards also play a role in creating legible printed duplicates as well as microfilm or scanned images.

From Paper to CAD

Drawings were produced in all-paper environments until the 1940s. The adoption of microfilm as a duplicating, distribution, and information access tool in the 1950s was considered a major technological improvement over paper systems.

In the 1980s, architectural and engineering firms gradually adopted computer-assisted design (CAD), a method originally developed for the aerospace, shipbuilding, and automotive industries. Using computers rather than manual processes to create, revise, and distribute drawings enables engineers to view a design from any angle and to zoom in or out for close-ups and long-distance views.

CAD systems display numbers and text as drawings, much like creating a pie chart from the text and numbers in a spreadsheet program. The foundation of a CAD drawing or model is a structured data file consisting of numbers and text with a set of instructions to display these values as a graphic. Most drawings or models consist of multiple data files. Changes to one file can be automatically reflected in all drawings that reference that file. The computer keeps track of design dependencies so that when one value is changed all other values that depend on it are automatically changed accordingly.

All CAD drawings are vector graphics (i.e., digital images created through a sequence of commands or mathematical statements that place lines and shapes in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space). Vector drawings must be converted into a raster image file--BMP, TIFF, GIF, or JPEG--in...