Digitization in archives and user services: Review of the information and communication techologies authority of Turkey

From past to present, to access archiving services a variety of technological tools and strategies have been used. Digitization has had a huge impact on Archives. For this reason, the development of digital archives has a special place in scientific and economic developments. Digital applications provide easy access to archives. However, the rapid change in technology brings archiving institutions to face different challenges. Among some of these problems is the increased need for hardware and software development, increased costs for system maintenance, system management, protection, and data management. Especially with increasing usage of data mining and data analysis as well as the increase in investments in these areas, the issue has become more important. In this study, the importance of digital archives, digital archive studies and the conditions related to the transition of paperless office applications have been investigated. In this context, a survey was carried out on March 2019 at the Information and Communication Technologies Authority of Turkey. Participants were asked to evaluate the conditions for information, documents and archive systems in the authority. Within this scope, benefits and positive/negative effects of corporate digital archiving, digitization of the archives of the research institution and the creation of corporate memory in electronic environment and the elimination of paper usage, gains and the impact from the ongoing digitization project done within the authority. In this context, literature reviews, descriptive statistics of the findings obtained as a result of the analyses carried out in the survey about the authority was analyzed. The mean, standard deviation, chi-square results, correlation and regression values of the questionnaires were interpreted. The hypothesis "digitization processes for digital archives need to be designed in order to develop safe models in accordance with corporate requirements and to ensure effective access to content" has been verified in the result of the study.