Carol Harrison is the registrar at the College of Southern Maryland, and back in the days of paper, she used to have a problem: keeping track of students' records, especially as they moved from one department to another, and through one process or system after another. It wasn't that the records disappeared; they were just, well, occasionally hard…

A transactional system is the routine method for carrying out certain processes. This paper describes how a transactional system can be developed and operated for an office that has no computer support. The model is an Office of Institutional Research (OIR). The OIR manual (noncomputer supported) transactional system at Texas Southern University…