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With a staff of seven persons, the Records Center/Imaging area at Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) is one of the largest records management operations in North Texas. The center currently contains 8052 containers, including 3457 for paper documents and 4595 for imaged documents.
DCCCD is a long term user of Intersect’s RCAMS Records Control and Management System software. Janet Huber, Assistant Records Manager, says “With RCAMS we have the big picture. Prior to RCAMS we had to look in several places, utilizing various software, and then sometimes just doing the old manual search to be able to determine what information we had. With RCAMS we now have a system in place where all the information, be it on paper, roll film, jacketfiche, or computer output microfilm, is on one database — a much more manageable system.”
The Network version of RCAMS is installed on the DCCCD’s Novell Local Area Network, and the central RCAMS database is accessed from several stations in the DCCCD records center for data entry, for locating and checking out individual records, and for a variety of review and reporting purposes.
The DCCCD records center also makes use of an RCAMS feature that allows field labels to be renamed to accommodate different naming conventions. In the case of DCCCD, the archiving of both paper records and an extensive collection of microfilm, and the need for appropriate distinguishing field names, made this feature useful.
DCCCD was also an early user of custom queries and reports, made possible by open access within a records department to the RCAMS central data files. Using Microsoft Office 97, Chrystal Hutching designs additional reports and queries specific to the DCCCD’s needs, and then imports the current RCAMS container data into Office to run the custom reports. The custom queries and reports are saved in Office Access 97 for convenient re-use. Each time the custom reports are run, Chrystal re-imports a copy of the current RCAMS container database into Office, and then selects and prints the desired reports. As an early customer with needs for custom reporting, DCCCD’s suggestions and input helped Intersect Systems define and develop the feature in the RCAMS database software that provides point-and-click export of the current data files for the custom reporting function, according to William Gattis of Intersect.
An early task after installing RCAMS at DCCCD was importing the DCCCD data from the older database system used into RCAMS. This was initially accomplished for the container database for paper records; a subsequent data transfer added DCCCD’s microfilm container database to the central RCAMS data files after a conversion of some of the microfilm contents to an updated naming system.
The Dallas County Community College District is the largest community college in Texas and ranks in the top five in the United States. The size of the DCCCD Records Center is due to the large institution it supports. The Dallas County Community College District is comprised of seven colleges located strategically throughout Dallas County. Each college offers a comprehensive curriculum including academic transfer programs, technical/occupational programs, and non-credit community service courses. Together the colleges enroll approximately 50,000 credit and 45,000 non-credit students per long semester and employ over 2,000 full-time faculty and staff members.
Over 200,000 students have enrolled in the distance learning program of the Dallas County Community Colleges, known as Dallas TeleCollege, since it began in 1972. Currently, approximately 10,000 students enroll in the program each academic year.
The LeCroy Center offers colleges and businesses the Global Learning Network, which allows institutions to deliver online training and instruction to individuals around the world.
The LeCroy Center also produces online courses and course components which are used by colleges and businesses worldwide. Dallas Telecourses is one of the largest producers of college-credit telecourses in North America, and is a principal supplier of telecourses to the PBS Adult Learning Service and Canadian networks.
The DCCCD also supplies telecourses to over 1200 of the nation's two- and four-year colleges and universities each semester, as well as institutions in more than 40 foreign countries. Several of these telecourses are among the top ten in use by U.S. colleges, and account for approximately 40% of all telecourse enrollments nationally. It's Strictly Business, Voices in Democracy, and Texas Politics and You are the most recent Dallas productions, and an accounting series is currently in production.
The Bill J. Priest Institute for Economic Development provides a wide range of training and counseling services to a cross-section of the Dallas business community, from the unemployed or under-employed worker looking for a marketable skill to the enthusiastic entrepreneur with a new idea to the CEO of a major corporation looking for a more cost-effective way to train employees.
The Institute brings together under one roof several components including the Edmund J. Kahn Job Training Center, the Business and Professional Institute, the North Texas Small Business Development Center, the Business Incubation Center, the International Trade Resource Center, and the Center for Government Contracting.
