Dear Adele,
A professional group that I'm part of discussed this very topic a couple of years ago and we came up with 2 approaches, given that most storage suppliers either provide no insurance or only a nominal amount (e.g. £20/box).
The first option is to insure for ACTUAL costs incurred as a direct result of losing the archive contents. Typically, you would have a maximum sum insured e.g. £5 million. In the event of your records being lost or damaged, you would then pursue a claim only if your company incurred additional costs directly as a result of the loss. For example, if you were unable to defend a litigation claim and you could prove that the existence of the lost records would have made a material impact on the case, you could claim damages. Similarly, if you had to reconstruct the records from other copies held elsewhere, you could claim for the cost of reconstruction of the files. I know of at least 1 digital archive vendor that provides insurance up to £5 million for loss of data stored with them.
The second option is to agree a reconstruction value for each box archive. For our specific industry (pharmaceuticals), we determined that a significant quantity of archived records exist somewhere else and so it would be possible in many situations to reconstruct the archived files. We did a rough calculation that to physically print documents from electronic source or photocopy documents from hard-copy sources, label files and include file dividers etc would cost in the region of £70 per level arch file. In addition, there would be a cost for searching for copies and other activities related to file reconstruction. The resource effort was estimated to be £50 per level arch file. So our estimated insurance value for each level arch file (or equivalent) was around £120 (or 25p/page). You would then request an insurance policy which valued each lever arch file deposited with the supplier at £120.
The group discussed intellectual property value of archive contents and agreed fairly swiftly that it would be impossible to put a value on this and to secure adequate insurance.
Regards,
Eldin.
Managing Director, Rammell Consulting Ltd.
-----Original Message-----
From: The Information and Records Management Society mailing list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Adele Picken
Sent: 20 August 2014 11:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Insurance of records held off-site
Dear ListServe,
We have recently undertaken a new contract with an off-site storage records supplier. They provide standard cover for Employers Liability, Public & Products Liability and Professional Indemnity and damage caused to the boxes but they do not provide insurance against loss or damage to the contents of boxes.
Has anyone else had experience of taking out additional insurance to insure the contents of boxes and, if so how have you gone about calculating the value of the contents? Or, have people generally found that the standard insurance provided by the off-site storage provider is enough?
Any advice or experiences would be much appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Adele
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