Records
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Paper copies of visit visa applications are currently kept for two years and are stored in a storeroom of 104 sq m. Records for all visa, passport, nationality and consular cases are kept on a records info system called IRIS which has computer indexing for immigration cases. There are currently about 1 million records and each person has a unique number as records are microfiched and entered individually into a unique microjacket. Separate records have been kept from 1987/88 and it is the HKID's intention that pre-87 records will be destroyed.
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The types of microfiche records held are detailed at
Annex 1. To separate out the UK and mixed records detailed at A and B since 1987 will, HKID believe, take them 83 man years. A letter from Woodrow in Hong Kong Department of 13.3.92 informed HKID that we would need only a selected database but HKID believe that this will be impossible to achieve as they have calculated that this would take 320 man years as they would have to split up microfiche spools by date. HKID naturally want to reduce as much as possible the amount of time they have to spend separating out records. They can live with the 83 man years to produce A and
B at Annex 1.
4. The IRIS system is such that details can be accessed by name, Chinese character, index number or type code e.g. BN (0). Access by any of these highlights the unique jacket number to each individual. HKID do not want to have to start splitting up individual jackets as this is a very slow and labour-intensive operation (which I can confirm as it was demonstrated to me). There are believed to be about 2. 2 million individual micro jacket records (one person may have more than one jacket) and mostly concern passport applications. However, it should be noted that because BTDCS are to be turned mainly into BN (0) s by 1996, the number of these records will rise steeply. The mixed records are calculated to be about 205,000.
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Current records are kept in six lectrievers which weigh about 2,400 kilos without jackets. Each lectriever requires
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