Janet,
I speak as somebody who has been in the computer output business for many
years and somebody who has set up CD and other services for service
companies. A few simple truism's:
1. It's no good outsourcing any archive of any description or scanning and
then ingesting into a records management system or outputting to CD unless
a basic classification scheme is in place.
2. Service companies don't mind if your sysem is inadequate - they will
just charge you more to retrieve the information if it's badly organised!
3. If there's no adequate classification in place then use the old 80/20
rule, set up a classification system to address your major problem areas
always remembering it will eventually be part of a much larger whole and
then consider the best method of archiving dependent on the record type,
the risk in the case of potential loss or a law suite and the likely
retention.
4. For records which are to be kept for a longish time (in excess of 10
years) with little likelyhood of retrieval, microfilm is a perfectly good
and low cast alternative.
Hope this helps,
David Aspinall
Datum Solutions Limited
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