Electronic Records/Document Management Systems and Services

Supporting the EPA in its mission to protect human health and the environment, Macfadden provides document and data management services related to the registration of pesticide products and the approval of pesticide labeling information for the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP).  These activities are mandated under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA rev. 1972) and the Pesticide Registration Improvement Renewal Act (PRIA II of 2007).  Macfadden also supports the operation of OPP’s Information Services Center, which is the repository for historical pesticide registration records.

Macfadden designed, developed and deployed an award-winning Integrated Document Management System (IDMS) to support the Treasury Offset Program (TOP) within the Financial Management Service of the U.S. Treasury Department. The fundamental purpose of TOP is to enable the federal government to withhold part or all of a payment to a citizen if the citizen is indebted to the federal government and in arrears in repayment. The TOP generates a significant amount of correspondence and telephone inquiries from affected citizens, especially during income tax season. By digitizing all of the TOP-related correspondence and developing unique methods for automatically processing returned mail within the IDMS, Macfadden enabled the Treasury Department's Financial Management Service to make dramatic cuts in the number of temporary customer service representatives required to handle telephone inquiries during tax season while reducing the time required to answer a caller's questions from hours to a few minutes. Macfadden delivered this highly successful system ahead of schedule and under budget. As a result, Macfadden earned both the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) Award for projects requiring superior integration skills and the Kinetic Information Group Process Innovation Award for creative and innovative solutions. After system implementation, the U.S. Treasury Department was able to expedite the collection of more than $4 billion in delinquent debt.

Following deployment of the IDMS, the U.S. Department of Treasury's Financial Management Service (FMS) tasked Macfadden with implementing a series of document archive applications and automating the business process workflow for several departments within FMS. These successful developments provided the basis for FMS to proceed with initiating enterprise-wide applications intended to bring similar cost savings to other components of FMS and to migrate the system to the next generation of software that will include a records management capability and a more flexible graphical user interface.

Macfadden has provided digital conversion services for the National Agricultural Library for more than 12 years.  One of the most interesting collections converted was the Screwworm Eradication Project archives that spanned five decades, from the 1930’s to the 1980’s.  The source documents for this project included monographs, scientific papers, brochures, pamphlets, watercolor paintings, black-and-white photographic prints, 35mm color slides, 16mm movie film and VHS videotape. Macfadden is adept at organizing data and the methods of navigation, indexing and searching that were developed as part of this project.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) awarded Macfadden a five-year contract to staff and operate the Data Management Center of its Insurance Operations Department. Under this contract, Macfadden digitized hundreds of thousands of participant files and hundreds of pension plan files from failed corporate pension plans taken over by the PBGC. Macfadden also provided related help desk services. Macfadden’s commitment to quality control and speed were critical to ensure that benefit checks continued without interruption during the transition from failed company to PBGC control.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) selected Macfadden to digitize a set of publications and videotaped demonstrations pertaining to impaired driving and the standardized field sobriety tests recommended for use by police officers when questioning drivers suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol. The objective was to create a fully searchable, CD-ROM-based, information resource for distribution nationwide to judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officials and other interested parties. The Government Printing Office has produced thousands of copies from the master CD-ROM developed by Macfadden, and the resulting product has been distributed nationwide by NHTSA.

The Smithsonian Institution awarded Macfadden a contract to create digital images of approximately 720,000 acquisition registration index cards on file in the National Museum of Natural History.

The National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers awarded Macfadden a contract to digitize the records of the National Register of Historic Places.  There are tens of thousands of approved “nomination” files in this collection, each of which typically contains a written description of the site, including reasons why it should be considered significant or historic, and several black and white photographs of the site

Macfadden was awarded a contract to digitize the Samuel Abraham Goudsmit papers.  This 70,000+ page collection is housed in the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics in College Park, MD.  Goudsmit was a physicist who was dispatched to Germany near the end of World War II for the purpose of assessing just how close the Germans were to building an atomic bomb.  His findings clearly showed that the German scientists had not figured out how to achieve a critical mass and sustain a nuclear reaction.  If the German scientists had been successful, the outcome on the European continent in 1945 probably would have been quite different.