Patent ID: 7689912

Claim:
A method of storing and retrieving electronic documents comprising the steps of: configuring a computer including at least one processor and at least one storage medium by loading onto the storage medium a computer program having a plurality of code sections, the code sections executed by the processor to perform: selecting a digital seal from a seal repository, wherein the seal repository stores a plurality of digital seals including preconfigured seals and user created seals, wherein the digital seals are stored using multi-level container objects, and wherein each digital seal includes at least one presentation attribute, wherein a container object can contain multiple presentation attributes including multimedia objects and wherein the container object can be selected based upon the presentation attributes; selecting at least one electronic document from a storage system; binding the digital seal with the at least one electronic document by a fastening event using a fastening application including a fastening peripheral, wherein the fastening peripheral executes within the fastening application and translates physical user actions into digital signals having meaning within the fastening application and records biometric fingerprint data used by the fastening application as an authorization code; generating an affixation describing the fastening event and storing the affixation in the storage system, wherein the affixation can associate one digital seal with many electronic documents, one electronic document to many digital seals, one digital seal to one electronic document, or many digital seals to many electronic documents; selecting an image and linking the authorization code for the digital seal with the selected image; encrypting the at least one electronic document associated with the digital seal by locking the digital seal with the selected image, wherein the selected image is required to decode the encrypted electronic document; retrieving the at least one electronic document by selecting the digital seal and decoding the electronic document using the selected image.