Ian, a personal-experience anecdote and a reference.

The anecdote:  twenty-plus years ago, the City of New York stored its
first-generation silver-gelatin (camera) microfilm with a certain
commercial storage vendor.

When the City moved (for reasons I won't go into here) to another
facility, all of the microfilm was supposed to have been sent from the
old facility to the new one.

A number of years after the move, the City agency that is the most
active user (in terms of accessioning and retrieval of film) discovered
that several hundred rolls of film were missing from the new storage
facility. After investigation, the old facility was contacted and the
staff there "discovered" the missing rolls of film, which had never been
shipped to the new facility.

The reference:  over the last two years (2007 and 2008), there was a
discussion on the listserv about the reliability of the tracking of
records stored at commercial off-site facilities. I did a very quick
search of the list archives and couldn't find it, but it wasn't the most
thorough search, so you may have better results (or someone else on the
list may have a better recollection of the discussion).

One contributor to the discussion thread described how, after moving to
a new storage vendor, he/she discovered a fairly huge discrepancy in the
box inventory (between the number of boxes listed by the old storage
vendor and the number of boxes received by the new vendor--in the tens
of thousands of boxes). After investigating the situation, the listserv
discussion contributor's company found out the old company had continued
to list in its inventory boxes of records that had been destroyed at the
end of their scheduled retention period.

To conclude, you may wish to review your lists of boxes destroyed at the
end of their scheduled retention period.

Then, sit down with the old vendor and see if you can develop a list of
search terms based on terms that the vendor did NOT use in its previous
attempts.

If those approaches don't work, you may want to consider how valuable
the missing records are and, if they are really valuable, get your
attorneys to pursue the matter.

Very best of luck.

Fred
===================================================================
Frederic J. Grevin
Deputy Commissioner and Chief Information Officer
The City of New York,
Department of Records
Email: [log in to unmask]
Land phone: 212.788.8615
Cell phone: 347.436.5360
Fax:  212.788.8614
www.nyc.gov/records
31 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
USA

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