> 
> I am going to be part of a panel presentation, next week, discussing
> issues that should be considered when making investments in electronic
> records management technology, including document scanning. 

  Interesting to see that scanning/imaging costs are being viewed as a 
component of "...investments in ERM technology..." but it seems as if they 
haven't asked for information regarding the costs of periodic conversion and 
migration associated with the resultant electronic files after the 
scanning/imaging. One of the consistent short-sighted styles of management 
is to think there are no further costs related to records management once 
source documents are scanned. 

 Has anyone done a recent analysis on the cost of microfilming a single,
> 8 1/2" document page vs. scanning a single, 8 1/2" page?
> Either doing it in-house (with your own staff and equipment) and/or
> contracting the work out? 
> 
  These are sort of simple time and motion studies once you have the raw 
costs determined based on your volume. There are a myriad of factors to 
consider, whether you're microfilming or scanning with respect to the 
quality you want on the final product, however. 
 Depending on the age, condition and present method used to manage your 
source documents, you may or may not be able to do simple batch 
processing.... which is the lowest cost alternative. If there is extensive 
"prep work" needed to get the documents ready for capture though, there will 
be much more labor involved and you may even need to make copies of some 
source documents to "enhance" their quality before attempting to convert 
them. 
 Decisions need to be made on the threshold used for your scanning to 
increase the usability of the content; if you simply want a "picture" of a 
source document that you can "scan and pan" across and hope to focus in on 
certain portions of the content, then you may be able to go with 75-150 
dpi... but if you want clear, usable, content then you'll likely be between 
300-600dpi. These decisions have a MAJOR impact on cost of storage of the 
resulting image collection. 
 Another consideration is most scanning/imaging project initially generate a 
TIFF image, which is no commonly converted to PDF prior to storage. It's a 
good idea to consider saving these TIFF "inter-images" as your deep backup 
to the image collection in the event the PDF becomes unreadable, primarily 
because you already have it and it's inexpensive to store off to tape. You 
should also consider creating two identical electronic copies of the files 
when you convert them, storing one off to media which is stored in an 
environment designed specifically to extend it's life expectancy.
 Lastly, don't underestimate the cost of indexing these images. Someone will 
need to do some up-front work to determine what level of indexing is 
required to make the electronic collection usable and if these records have 
a long-term retention requirement (anything that exceeds 10 years) it would 
be advisable to include in that indexing information a location code for the 
physical records (source documents), which should be retained in the event 
the electronic copies become inaccessible over time. 
 The options here range from OCR of the full content (not recommended, 
unless there is a specific need for it) to manually entering data for any 
number of fields of information from the documents, to developing an 
automated capture of certain content from specified areas of forms to 
populate a database. 
 
>  I recognize that there are a ton of variables here, but I'm looking to
> boil this down to a small, understandable unit. Given that I have to
> cover this topic in about a 15 minute presentation, I can't spend a lot
> of time on this "comparison."
> 
 If you "...boil this down to a small, understandable unit...", then they 
will completely miss the need to do a further investigation and deeper study 
of the concept. This is one of those classic "solutions looking for a 
problem to resolve" scenarios. Someone has it in their head that they can 
save the organization money by imaging the paper source document collection 
by eliminating the need to continually use space to store paper. 
 What they haven't considered is the value to the organization of the 
information they are considering imaging, the possibility that the ROI isn't 
there to spend $2 to image something that would potentially be destroyed in 
3 years and would cost $0.35 to continue to store for that same period and 
the potential risk if stored electronically beyond that period (because they 
can't easily discard an electronic image... only the pointer to it) and what 
they hope to gain by having it available electronically. Not to mention the 
conversion, migration, media degradation, format, hardware and software 
obsolescence issues....
 Hey... maybe it will be you chance for "15 minutes of fame" to give them 
something else to think about!
 Larry

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