Kelly:
In addition to Fred's excellent comments, you should consider the cost of converting to electronic and subsequently maintaining the records in electronic format.

1.What is the cost to convert all that paper to electronic images, with appropriate indexing?  It may come as a shock to the budget.  You may find that keeping the current paper until retention runs out and going this day forward with scanning to be the more reasonable cost.  This, of course, defeats the purpose of getting rid of the records storage facilities.
2. You need to have the paper records organized in a way that an easily used index can be prepared as part of the scanning process.  If your paper is unorganized, it will be very time consuming to figure out what you have and how people need to access them before you can develop the indexing.  Without some proper indexing, you will have difficulty accessing the records, even with OCR capabilities.  Basically you could end up with a few very large (like hundreds of pages each) files that must be searched by the system to find a particular record.
3. How are you going to continue to scan paper into electronic format and index the images once the initial project is complete?  Are some of the records proposed for scanning received and/or created in paper format?  Who will do the everyday (or every week) scanning and indexing?

Ginny Jones 
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI) 
Records Manager 
Information Technology Division 
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities 
Newport News, VA 
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