With regard to Offsite Storage Box Stacking, I think that the trend  
may be to move to higher density for several reasons:

1) The Industry fought to change from the 250,000 cubic foot storage  
compartment of records to a larger compartment as part of the trend  
of mergers and acquisitions that created very large storage companies.

(Iron Mountain, Recall, NRC, NOVA, Goldman-Sachs, Access, Sterling  
and Retrievex to name a few of the larger players on the box side.   
Many of these have moved to larger compartments as allowable under  
the revised NFPA 232 Standard which now allows a larger volume of  
records in one compartment.)

If density is king then stacking higher is a natural component of a  
business that is really a commodity business.

2) PRISM, Iron Mountain and Fire Protection Consortium have  
collaborated on a sprinkler system and rack design that will be  
incorporated into NFPA 13 Sprinkler Standard. This new design under  
real world fire testing has proven very effective at limiting a fire  
to a very small bay. The additional sprinkler flu space make it  
desirable to stack to a higher density in the same 9'x 9' or 12' x  
12' bay. When this technology is implemented around the country in  
storage warehouses, records storage will be much safer. So in this  
design 4 High may be advantageous from a density stand point although  
it may make retrievals more cumbersome.

3) The reduction in the number of retrievals!!  If you think about  
it, have you not reduced the number of times you retrieve a box in  
this age of digital records.  I know I leave my desk far fewer time  
to access a file cabinet.  Everything I need is right there in my  
computer or my my back up server.

Has anyone tracked the number of times you retrieve a box this year  
versus five years ago?  So this is pressure on the storage industry  
as boxes tend to just sit there.  Can we have some honest answers on  
this volume?  Is it less in your organization?

Boxes sit on a shelf for less than 10 years in this world of  
expedited shredding and destruction of old records.  This is a sign  
of excellent records management but again, the storage company is  
seeing his box volumes shrink and must be more efficient in their  
storage.

Only 30% of records created move to paper format so this is a  
reduction. Think of all the memos that emails replace.  I receive  
emails that have a footer that says "Be kind to the Planet Earth and  
do not print this email."

These are all excellent examples of records management creating cost  
efficiencies for the organization.

Or am I wrong about the number of retrievals being less this last  
year than say five years ago?


Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
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(610)  756-4440    Fax (610)  756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM


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