Dear Rob,

  I am a reseller/manufacturer of microfilm products so I will keep my 
answers general rather than talking about the particular products I sell.
  Up to a few years ago the simulatneuos capture of both 16mm and 35mm 
images in one jacket/fiche was difficult. The normal approach was a two 
tiered one - scan the jacket first on one particular type of scanner and 
capture all the 16mm frames. Then scan the same jacket on another scanner to 
get the 35mm frames.
  Naturally this took time and therefore cost more (whether you did it 
yourself or sent it out to a bureau).
  Now most of the new production film scanners can scan both 16mm and 35mm 
frames from the one jacket in one pass. Please note I emphasize production 
as the on-demand type scanners can not do this.
  As such the ability now exists, it is just a matter of how you do it. 
There are four options:-

1) Buy one of these production scanners (for circa £40,000) and do the job 
yourself. Each jacket (of 3 x 35mm images and upto 36 x 16mm images plus 
your 16mm only jackets and your 35mm only jackets) can be scanned in approx 
a minute with a maximum time of 2 minutes.

2) Get a bureau with one of these latest generation fiche scanners to price 
a per image job to scan them for you. Please bear in mind that based on 
approx 65,000 jackets all being combination jackets of 36 images of 16mm and 
3 of 35mm, this will cost approx £76,000.00 based on a very rough rule of 
thumb of 3p per image (for both 16mm and 35mm images, although most bureaus 
will charge more for the 35mm images.) Swing side is that your jackets will 
not all be full so the cost should be slightly lower than this.

3) Buy an on demand scanner for approx £7000 and scan as you go but this 
will take an age and will require a database system that will allow you to 
add images as you scan them. However it is a very cost effective solution.

4) The off site storage of your microfilms is an option. Naturally you will 
need to estimate how many requests you will make to see how much this will 
cost you on going. The costs per request will be quite high though. You will 
also need to factor in the charge for storage of your jackets.

I am afraid it all comes down to your budget, staffing levels and time 
scale. If you have plenty of money and no spare staff then get a bureau to 
do it for you. If you have a reasonable amount of money and some spare staff 
then buy the production unit and scan it yourself. If you have very little 
money and plenty of spare staff then buy an on demand scanner (or a few) and 
scan as you go or put the jackets out to storage.

The capture of paper planning documents can easily be added to this project 
although they will obviously be captured on a totally different type of 
large format device.

I hope the above approx costs and information are of help.

Regards,

Paul Negus
Managing Director
Genus Group - The Microfilm Shop
www.genusit.com, www.microfilm.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rob Teran" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2006 12:47 PM
Subject: digital capture of microfiche


Dear List

I work for Elmbridge Borough Council and we are currently drafting the
requirement specification for the digital capture of planning files and
microfiche slides.

It was recently suggested to me by a doc-management supplier that
microfiche containing both 16mm and 35mm images would make it difficult to
automate the image capture process and result in high labour costs. We
store approximately 65,000 slides which include 2-channel (containing up to
six 35mm frames), combination (up to three 35mm frames and thirty-six 16mm
frames) and 5-channel (up to sixty 16mm frames).

The following 2 suggestions were put to me:


a) to supply you with a suitable networked microfiche scanner so that you
can scan on demand, adding the scanned image to your library of scanned
documents so that you never have to re scan a microfilm record that has
been previously requested,

b) we store your microfilm for you and offer a scan-on-demand or print-on-
demand service.


In cost effective terms could anyone please advise whether the above 2
options would be more benficial than sending off larger batches for scan
which we originally intended to do bearing in mind most of our slides
contain both 16mm and 35mm frames.

Any information on this subject would be much appreciated, thanks.

Rob


Rob Teran
Electronic Media & Graphics Officer

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