Microfiche to CD ROM
Optical storage such as CD-ROM can vastly reduce the space required for storage when compared to the legacy systems of microfiche. While microfiche was a great invention and can have a shelf life up to 500 years, organizations that currently use the microfiche format may have to look into moving legacy films to a searchable text electronic format…
Microfiche cut document storage size down by as much as 99% or more
(though are still far inferior to CD-ROM).
There are many disadvantages – Most people searching documents these days want to be able to use search queries, which of course, microfilm does not offer. OCR – optical character recognition allows old documents to be fully text searchable which saves countless hours when retrieving old documents.
Users now generally want quick ways of finding specific information, and could care less about printing entire documents. Further, entire documents can easily be located printed from optical storage based documents if need, while microfilm doesn’t offer good search facilities.
When and if laws change, legacy documents can systematically be loaded into exisiting DMS systems by scanning and running OCR software. This will allow for full text search and quick finding of old documents.
In the meantime, companies need to decide whether they want to invest in digital archiving in the event that microfilm and other ‘hard copy’ archiving solutions are no longer required and become totally obsolete.
Microfiche to cd is a valuable service, which has the possibility to take old microfiche and make them into text searchable documents on the internet.
