Public:Brief History of Archiving Construction Documents

From Facade

A concise tour of how we got here, from a book recommended by buildingSMARTAlliance et al.

BIG BIM little bim - The practical approach to Building Information Modeling - Integrated practice done the right way! Finith Jernigan, AIA

from page 209 (emphasis added):

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The changes that occurred in the production and archiving of construction documents is one example:

Owners historically archived ink on vellum and pencil on paper. When they needed data someone searched through the files and field verified their "paper" records--the time-tested approach;

They then moved to plastic lead on Mylar media. This change had minimal costs, since nothing much changed for the owners. In fact, this medium improved owners' archival abilities;

Then pin-bar compositing systems were developed, ushering in what would later become complex CADD layer conventions and creating major archival difficulties;

Then large owners invested in CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) on mainframes. Each station cost a lot of money and the technology that fostered this change was so new that few gave thought to the realities of archival data. Much data was lost due to format incompatibility and tape drives that quickly became obsolete;

Then the standard moved to CADD (compute Aided Drafting and Design) on minicomputers. Archived data continued to be lost to software revisions and format incompatibility, floppy disks and Winchester drives;

More recently, the standard became personal-computer-based 2D CADD. Archived data continued to be lost due to lack interoperability, complexity of standards and lack of long-term storage media. File systems became so complex and hardware dependent that it became difficult to access archives quickly;

Then a few owners moved to 3D CADD on laptops. Data is not database driven, not intelligent, usually not interoperable and does not comply with a single standard;

And now to BIM and integrated processes.

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