Apollo Blueprints

[echnaton]

bob said:

echnaton said:

Upon completion of such a project, how much of that documentation would be kept? How much would be turned over to the client? How much destroyed?

As Jay mentioned in one of his earlier posts, there is no single repository for all this documentation. Each party involved in the project has and retains a part of the paperwork. For instance, if one wants to see a fabrication drawing for some specific component, it may be necessary to go to the manufacturer who made it. The owner, engineer, or contractor may not have, or even seen for that matter, the particular drawing in question.

So what I gather then is that Jay’s description of the treatment of Apollo documents is not out of the ordinary but generally coincides with the practice in your industry.

I work in the investment management business. We have no set period of time that we keep information regarding our reasons for investment decisions, to buy, to hold or to sell. Generally we have a fixed amount of file drawer space and have someone come in twice a year and discard stuff out of the back of the folders until we have room for the next six months. This leaves us with about two years worth of information and folders for companies that we no longer invest in eventually get recycled.

My firm also does valuations for privately held companies. For that work we keep final documents forever. However all our work can fit in a few file cabinets so it is not a major problem.

[Bob B.]

bob said:

I believe we are required by law to keep construction documents for a certain period of time, though I don't recall what it is. I don't think it is any longer then about ten years.

I've done some further checking on this and it seems the only thing we are required by law to retain is accounting information, such as payroll records, invoices, etc. The person I asked didn't know how long the records have to be kept, but he believes it is about 3 to 5 years depending on the particular document. We are apparently under no obligation to retain any engineering or construction documents; we are governed only by common sense.

[Bob B.]

echnaton said:

So what I gather then is that Jay’s description of the treatment of Apollo documents is not out of the ordinary but generally coincides with the practice in your industry.

Yes, I think this is a fair statement to make.

We go through what is called a submittal process. For instance, a manufacturer will submit to the general contractor a bill of material, specifications, and/or shop drawings for the particular item he intends to provide. The contractor will review this literature to make sure it complies with the project requirements and then coordinates with the submittals of other manufacturers to make sure everything works together. Once the contractor approves the submittals they are sent to the engineer who must also review and approve them. After the submittals have been approved for construction, final corrected copies are distributed to all the appropriate parties.

The submittals include only the information required by the contractor and engineer. The manufacturer may require additional drawings to, say, send to the machinist out in the shop. These drawing additional drawings may never be seen by anyone but the manufacturer.

Similarly, the design engineer produces a considerable amount of documentation that never leaves his office. For instance, if the contractor is to construct a concrete footing he needs to know only the specified concrete mix, the footing dimensions, and the size and spacing of reinforcing steel. The contractor doesn't need to see all the engineer's design calculations. This latter information stays with the engineer. On the flip side, the engineer doesn't need to see the contractor's formwork design drawings. The engineer doesn't care how the contractor builds something, only that the final product complies with the project requirements.

Although there is a great deal of information shared between the principle players in a construction project, there is also a large amount of detailed information that is produced and used by only one party, thus it is not shared. I think this is typical practice across almost all industries.

[LunarOrbit]

Are copies of blueprints for all buildings kept on file by the towns or cities they are build in?

[Bob B.]

admin said:

Are copies of blueprints for all buildings kept on file by the towns or cities they are build in?

I rarely get involved in privately owned construction so I'm not real sure what the normal procedure is. Generally it is the owner of the building or facility that keeps a set of record drawings. In the case of waterworks, which is what I usually work on, this is the public utilities department. I don't imagine the local government gets too involved in private construction other than the issuance of permits and building inspections. I'm not sure what records they keep, though I'm quite certain there is no central repository of blueprints for all the buildings in a city.

[TaeKwonDan]

admin said:

Are copies of blueprints for all buildings kept on file by the towns or cities they are build in?

I can't answer this for the city, but my wife said that the usual amount of time her firm keeps a paper copy is 10 years before they are destroyed. Electronic copies are kept in perpetuity.

[bmk]

bob said:

In the case of waterworks, which is what I usually work on, this is the public utilities department. I don't imagine the local government gets too involved in private construction other than the issuance of permits and building inspections. I'm not sure what records they keep, though I'm quite certain there is no central repository of blueprints for all the buildings in a city.

I can't speak for other states, but I volunteer at the Southwest Regional section of the State Archives here in Washington. We deal with archiving history from the city/county level of government. We have *masses* of blueprints of city, county and private business buildings, sewer systems, pumping stations and city electrical grids. About the only thing we don't wind up with is blueprints of private dwellings. Tax records on them and county auditor photos both aerial and ground, yup, but not blueprints. Those remain with the individual County Auditor's offices. I would imagine the retention schedules and methods vary greatly from state to state. Oh! And I'm greatly enjoying the Forum!! Thanks to all those who post detailed answers on things Apollo--I'm just eating it up and learning a lot. ;D

bmk

[JayUtah]

Boeing, for example, uses Catia for engineering design management. That's a software system that incorporates the modeling methods and production techniques used in aerospace and similar industries. It's a very extensive system, and virtually any drawing needed for any purpose can be generated on the fly from the stored models. Thus it is unnecessary to retain design information in paper form. The industry is getting away from stored paper drawings as a means for satisfying document retention regulations. The physical volume needed to store Catia datasets is several orders of magnitude smaller than the equivalent content in paper, and one or two orders of magnitude smaller than microfilm.

[bmk]

Electronic data is much tidier, but.... We have several boxes of old 5 1/4" floppies containing accounting data. No idea what program was used originally to generate the files and no 5 1/4" drives at the Archives to access the data even if we had a copy of the program. As quickly as computer hardware and software changes, it's next to impossible for an Archive to keep one of each on hand in order to access the info. Admittedly, 8 year old accounting info from a small town isn't much in demand, but retention and retrieval of information from outdated electronic media is a big issue for archivists. Paper, for all of it's bulk is surprisingly resilient. We just removed some old newspaper clippings glued to the pages in a ledger from 1859-1860. The only way to soften the glue was to soak individual pages in water overnight. No damage to the underlying paper and the iron-gall ink came through as dark as the day it was made.

bmk

[Sticks]

It looks like the nuclear industry here in the UK has gone back to storing documents on paper

See this link

A project to record life in the 1980's ran in to trouble when we lost the technology to read the electronic media See this link

So storing boxes of paper may not be such a bad idea after all.

[JayUtah]

Yes, unfortunately there is no cure yet for "bit rot".