Cost Alternatives between Archive Box Storage v Scanning and Electronic Storage
There are in the region of 560 Archive Boxes, each containing approximately 1800 sides or images. The requirement is to project the differing costs between the cost of Document Archive Box Storage and Retrieval, and the Conversion to Digital Format to enable In-House computer Access.
Paper Archive Storage and Retrieval
Year Number	Boxes	Storage Cost per Month per Box	Total Monthly Storage Cost	Total Annual Storage Cost	Number of Access per Annum	Cost to Off-Site Access, Scan and Return	Total Annual Access Cost	Total Annual Cost
1	560	£0.40	£224	£2,688	144	£40	£5,760	£8,448
Change figure to actual access usage					Cost Over Ten Years			£84,480
Cost of Digital Conversion Enabling Computer Access
Total Number of Images	Cost Of Scanning - per Image	Application of OCR Word Search Capability - per Image	Estimated Indexing Costs	Total Cost of Image Processing		Logistics Costs - Transport, CD's etc		Total Project Cost
1,000,000	£0.030		£560.00	£30,560		£1,800		£32,360
The above chart assumes an archive access requirement of one per day from each of the twelve departments. However, this does not take into account the speed and convenience of retaining the archive in an accessable format to everyone in the company with access to a computer terminal and Adobe Acrobat Reader, and the cost saving of staff time.