Sasha asked "Also, when we are talking about where to place the in-active records -we mention about off-site. What does it mean off-site  in some cases it is out of active area. If the organization decides that it is convenience to keep records as close to active area as possible - what is wrong in it."

Sasha, it may not be 'wrong', but it's costly and may make retrieval of genuinely active records more difficult.

In my experience, most users greatly overestimate how much they use their less-active records.

For example, a violations-adjudication unit with which I worked needed a detailed inventory of their records, both active and inactive.

There wasn't enough room in their office spaces to conduct the inventory on site. In addition, they had agreed to send their inactive records to off-site storage at a commercial records center (CRC).

So it was decided to send all of their records -- active as well as inactive -- to the CRC's facility for inventory. After the inventory was completed, the intent was to keep the inactive records at the CRC and send the active records back to the unit's offices.

There was some sort of misunderstanding (we never figured out exactly what happened), and the CRC accessioned ALL of the records (active as well as inactive).

As you may imagine, the head of the unit had a fit, and demanded all of the active records be returned to the offices.

However, because the records had been accessioned by the CRC, we would have had to pay a retrieval charge of US $10 per box. In addition, there had been a US $2 per box charge for accessioning, so moving the several hundred boxes of active records back to the offices would have cost a good deal of money. Since we couldn't prove it had been the vendor's error, we would have had to pay for the return.

So I asked the head of the violations-adjudication unit to wait a few weeks to see how much retrieval activity would occur for the active records. The idea was that, if the retrieval rate were really high, its expense would justify the cost of returning all of the active records back to the offices. 

The unit head reluctantly agreed

Over the first few weeks, the unit head was so worried about retrieving the active records that he would request Emergency Retrieval (US $20 per box, for 4-hour turnaround time) as opposed to Standard Retrieval (US $10 per box for 1 business day turnaround).

So I asked him if he really needed the records back in 4 hours. He conceded this wasn't really necessary, and that he was just worried about getting the records in a reasonable amount of time. It turned out that the Standard (1 business day) retrieval turnaround time met his needs, so he agreed to switch to that.

After 12 months of retrievals (including the initial Emergency retrievals), the unit had spent almost exactly ........ US $2,500!

Whether the costs of accession, storage, and retrieval will be offset by the savings from storage off-site instead of in office space obviously calls for a cost-benefit analysis. But this turns out to be the case more often than not.

This will not always be the case, obviously, but there is an alternative method for dealing with retrievals, which is known as "scan-on-demand". Instead of returning the physical records to the user, the storage facility can scan the records, index them, and transmit electronically both images and index to the user. 

Hope this is a clear (if lengthy) response to your question.

Best regards.

Fred Grevin
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