Largest Info Management Facility In South Island Opens

Largest Information Management Facility In South Island Opens

State of the art security met old-time Christchurch this week when document management company Recall New Zealand began its move into a new multi-million-dollar purpose-built facility.

The new facility is on a 2.4 hectare site in Dakota Park, a freight and logistics precinct developed by Christchurch International Airport Limited (CIAL).

Recall is an international business records storage and archives company and its new facility has been under construction for the past year.

General Manager Marcos Mota says it¹s very exciting to see it completed and hundreds of thousands of cartons moving in.

³Recall New Zealand is investing in Christchurch and this new facility should be seen as a sign of our confidence in the city as it recovers and rebuilds², Mr Mota says.

³We have taken great care to evaluate and utilise all the best practices and technology from around the world. The new construction and racking system fully comply with the new Seismic Design Factor now applicable to the Christchurch area.²

Security is tight. Every part of the facility is covered by CCTV, vascular scanning (scanning the veins in the hand of the person seeking entry) controls access to parts of the facility and other measures are not publicly discussed.

In addition to being the largest facility of its type in the South Island, it contains the largest commercial archive vault in the country, designed to provide secure storage for items of high intrinsic value and long term preservation of historical and irreplaceable items. This archive vault has a three-hour fire rating and is equipped with state-of-the-art temperature and humidity controls.

Set against this technology is elegant décor, including large photographs of 1946 Christchurch. A full wall black-and-white image of Cashel Street is a poignant reminder of how the street once looked, compared to its quake-damaged state now, but intended to pay homage to Christchurch¹s history. Other walls carry images of Cathedral Square and Lichfield Street as they were in 1946.

A Christchurch lawyer placed the first carton of files on a rack in the new storage facility. All clients¹ names went in a hat and Richard Lang, a partner at Duncan Cotterill, drew the honour of placing a carton of his firm¹s files on the new shelves. ³Duncan Cotterill has been utilising Recall since 1995 and all our archive files from Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland are sent to Recall on a daily basis,² he says. ³We were very impressed at the high standard of the archives vaults which meet and exceed the NZ archiving standards.²

ENDS ¬

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