New tools and new solutions for the Institute
Finance hardly ever features in the news on our Web site, yet it is an essential activity within the Institute. So today we want to share the good news that the team studying the future financing of the General Administration is on the point of completing the first part of its work. Once this is finished, the team will study the financing of the administrative units with fewer resources and that of the Sector «ad gentes», so as to present these works to the General Council for their examination in the plenary session of January 2012.
For its part, the Secretary General’s department proposed an updating of the computer services of the General Administration. The technical work has been entrusted to Brother Marcelo De Brito (Cruz del Sur), who has revised and updated these services. The new computer structure is intended to respond to the needs not only of the Secretary General’s department but also of all the administrative units. Thanks to a Web system, the data from each Provincial Secretary’s office can go directly to a central server. This will simplify the process of entering and consulting data and thus avoiding the duplicating of information or the multiplication of errors.
Brother Pedro Sánchez de León, Secretary General, is in train of contacting the persons responsible in the provincial secretariats, by geographical zones or working languages, in order to explain the new system of data collecting and to do some practical exercises.
A tool which the Institute wants to promote for the good management of provincial archives is Archivum, a software program already used by the General Administration and certain provinces. The province of Brésil Centre Sud has generously offered to have Pergamum, a powerful software tool for the management of the files of archives and libraries, developed by our Catholic Pontifical University of Parana (PUCPR), Brasil, proposed as a new version of Archivum (v3) for the service of the whole Institute. Other than the computer application, the Archivum sustem includes an assemblage of directives, criteria, specifications and procedures for guaranteeing the correct treatment of the official documentation, its preservation and access by a third party.