On New Year’s Day, George Gillespie opened Web-Room, a digital document storage operation and computer catch-all designed to help Albert Leans jump into the new millennium.

Saturday, January 20, 2001

On New Year’s Day, George Gillespie opened Web-Room, a digital document storage operation and computer catch-all designed to help Albert Leans jump into the new millennium.

Through Web-Room, Gillespie hopes to show area businesses the benefits of digital storage and make computers accessible to more people in the area.

According to Gillespie, a company can expect employees to spend about 15 percent of office time looking for files. Digital document storage saves businesses time, money and the headaches of looking for misfiled documents, he said.

&uot;You can put 56,000 pieces of paper on one CD-Rom with no compression,&uot; he said.

To put it another way, a business can store the contents of a three-drawer filing cabinet on one CD, he said. Instead of miles of filing cabinets storing personnel records, purchase orders, maintenance or tax records, businesses can keep digital archives, saving themselves a lot of space and time searching for documents, he said.

CDs are simple to use, tamper-resistant, and portable, he said. They cannot be demagnetized like a floppy disk and have a shelf-life of 100 years.

With a 30 gigabyte hard drive, companies could store a year’s worth of documents right on their computer and have them instantly accessible, he said.

Businesses can also hire Web-Room to manage their archives. The company will store archives, update them once a month and create a CD-Rom copy for the business to keep in a safe place.

Documents are saved as jpeg files so they are exact copies of the original paper, he said. They are printable and easy to find using a computer’s searching application.

&uot;They go into a file folder, just like a filing cabinet,&uot; he said.

For 15 cents a page, Web-Room will convert 2 1/2 pages per minute, either on-site or at their offices.

It is a cutting-edge industry, Gillespie said. Searching on the Web, he has only been able to find three other companies in the United States doing digital document storage.

In addition to, or instead of hiring his service bureau to scan archives, Gillespie hopes to show some businesses how to handle archiving.

&uot;I would like to sell it to companies and set them up to do it themselves,&uot; he said. &uot;Because if they do it on a daily basis, they could get rid of their filing cabinets in seven years.&uot;

In addition to digital document management, Gillespie will offer a number of computer related services at his office. He is in the process of hooking up public-use internet stations that can be used on a first-come, first-served basis for $3 an hour.

&uot;This is going to be a place where people can come and browse the internet, because not everybody has a computer yet,&uot; he said.

The company’s web site, www.web-room.net, features interactive video and sound.

&uot;I ordered a video camera,&uot; he said. &uot;I’m going to point it toward the courthouse, so if they have a ceremony or anything, people can actually see it from my site.&uot;

Web-Room can also do scanning, printing, faxing and design brochures and business cards, he said.

It is a different type of business limited only by a computer’s capabilities.

&uot;The thing that actually makes this possible is today’s technology,&uot; he said.

Web-Room is located at 402 South Broadway in Albert Lea, and can be contacted at 377-8591. Hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 12 to 6 p.m. Sunday.