BACKFILE CONVERSION AND MICROFILM: SO HAPPY TOGETHER .
Backfile conversions can be monstrous jobs. After you've converted your paper to microfilm, don't throw it away. Take the next step. What's the next step? Imaging of course
Imaging has breathed new life into microfilm. It's now a more viable storage solution than ever before. So take your rolls of film, your microfiche, your aperture cards and scan, scan, scan. Get them on line.
Don't make your people search through rolls of film every time they need information. Make this information available electronically.
But hang on to your microfilm. Microfilm is the most trusted, most timeless, most established form of archiving. And its cheap too. Store up to 275 megs of data on a roll of 16mm microfilm. The cost? Just $.03 per MB.
Here's why microfilm is still viable:
1.It's easy. With the growing number of hybrid systems on the market, it's easier than ever to convert mounds of paper. Hybrid scanners scan and film your paper in one pass. Go on-line with your data while you archive.
2.It's a truer image. Scanning from film can create a truer image than scanning from paper. Most states recognize filmed images an original images.
3.It's good for archiving. Some organizations see microfilm archives as a safety net. Others like government agencies, insurance companies and human resource departments see it as a must.
4.It lasts. Microfilm has the longest proven lifespan of any media. It lasts more than 100 years. Optical discs and CDs also have long shelf lives.
Some states require them to be copied every 10 years. Why? Remember the 10" floppy? Do you know anyone who still has this type of drive? Microfilm technology doesn't change much. And even if it does, all you need is a light source and magnifying glass to read your data.
5.It's compact. Save money on office space.
Kodak's (Rochester, NY 716-724-4000) Scanner/Microimager 990 ($80,000) is a high-volume hybrid scanner.
Hybrids are new machines that film and scan in one pass. Options include an Adaptive Threshold Processor (ATP), an image enhancer that improves the quality of images from originals with colored backgrounds.
The 990 handles batch separating, barcoding and indexing. These are great for organizations that are doing day-forward filming and imaging.
Kodak's Document Archiver creates film from images. Selectively archive your electronic documents.
Minolta's (Ramsey, NJ 201-825-4000) MicroDAX 3000 workstation ($15,900) consists of the MS 3000 microfilm scanner, software and an imaging board for the PC. It offers high-speed viewing, editing, storage and distribution of scanned images right to a desktop PC. Images scanned from film are ready for storage or distribution.
The ProScan microfilm scanner ($80,000-$100,000) from Sunrise (Fremont, CA 510-657-6250) digitizes roll film, microfiche and aperture card images by switching modules. The 8800 camera lets users select the resolution for faster throughput or higher resolution scanning. This is a great product for people working with different formats produced over a period of time or from different departments. ProScan comes bundled with SunRise's ScanFlo software for Windows NT.
For smaller, more selective jobs, try the SelectScan AP 1000 ($35,000-$45,000) aperture card scanner. Throughput of E-size drawings is 600 cards per hour at 200 dpi with an output resolution range of 100-500 dpi. Scan in binary or grayscale. Frame, deskew, detect edges, crop, remove noise, rotate and scan multiple images from a single card.
Canon's (Lake Success, NY 716-328-5000) Digital Microprinter 400 ($5,200) is a desktop digital reader-printer/scanner system. It offers an optional video or SCSI-II interface for connecting to a network, or for transmitting images via the Internet, fax or email. Change the film carriers for fiche, jackets, aperture cards and roll film.
BlipChip's (Short Hills, NJ 201-379-6431) V Intelligent Microfilm Controller ($2,500) is a combination blip and image sensor. It automates the scanning of blipped and non-blipped 16mm and 35mm microfilm Canon, InfoGraphix, Minolta and ScreenScan scanners. It's compatible with VersaIMAGE software from Blue Water Systems.
Fuji's (Elmsford, NY 914-789-8100) M Drive ($18,000) accesses stored 16mm roll microfilm images and converts them into images for your PC. It uses a SCSI interface and is the size of a PC tower. View, edit or print images. Transfer them electronically. Download them to a hard drive, floppy or CD-ROM.
Policies By Email at National Life of Vermont
National Life of Vermont is putting their microfilmed insurance policies on-line. Their paper files go back 150 years. In 1998 the records center completed a 30 million image conversion to jacketed microfiche. This really cleaned up their offices because they got rid of the mountains of paper files that had been stored on their office floors.
Jacketed microfiche provided safe keeping for these files. They were easy to update. New filmed documents were simply inserted in the right place. But this was an interim system. They needed something that let the records center get requested files to remote agencies more efficiently.
"We had to ask ourselves, can we manage our historical files differently?" says Mark Robinson, records and administration manager. "We are the centralized base for all the policy holder files for life insurance. They get sent from here to the other agencies. This keeps their workload down and frees up office space." National Life of Vermont has agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
A team at National Life of Vermont saw imaging as a solution. They wanted to use their existing LAN network. Spaulding Company (Stoughton, MA 617-828-8090), a Minolta (Ramsey, NJ 201-825-4000) reseller, showed them the Minolta MicroDAX 3000 hybrid imaging system. Testing was smooth. They were surprised at how easy it was to distribute information over their existing email system.
"We've never installed a system that went in as easily as MicroDAX did," says Robinson. "The hardest thing was getting approval from the other sites."
The goal is to have all of their agencies using the email system to access policy files from the records center. An agent pulls up a standard order form from their desktop, fills it in and emails it to the records center. At the records center the requested images are attached as objects and emailed back.
The images can be viewed, deleted or printed from a PC. Users can view on Novell GroupWise 4.1, Windows 95 or Windows 2.1. Monitors are Panasonic and Cornerstone.
"Before we looked up each requested file from the fiche, sent it to our headquarters for printing and then sent it to the agency that made the request. This took one to two days," says Robinson. "It's now down to a few hours."
The system cuts down leg work. Some policy files are 60-180 pages. The imaging system lets users search for a specific document. "We now ask users to request one piece of information instead of the whole file," says Robinson. "Why would someone in billing need to know if the policy holder is a smoker or stunt pilot?
"We now have 60 million filmed images. This would take years to convert. We image upon request." National Life still films the new policy files that come into their office. "These records have to last forever," says Robinson. "The microfilm is still needed for archiving. Eventually we want to have everything filmed and imaged."
They use two MicroDAX 3000 workstations. The total cost was $50,000. "The system works very smoothly," says Robinson. "There are two people running things part time. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to image one file with quality control. We do everything very easily inhouse."
Official Records Are More Accessible
Microfilm is a popular, proven and legally accepted archival medium. Some states only accept original paper documents, or original microfilmed copies of documents. Other states like Florida accept optical media. Microfilm's main advantage over paper is that each image is smaller, reducing physical storage space. It also has better access and transmissibility.
In Hillsborough County, Florida you have to go to the courthouse to search the official records. First you search an index to get the book and page numbers for the record, locate the film, load it and scroll to the right image. Very time consuming. It's even more time consuming if someone is using the roll of film you want.
Richard Ake, Hillsborough County's Clerk of the Circuit Court, realized that it would be easier and less time consuming if people were able to dial-in and view images on-line.
He's implementing a solution that begins and ends with microfilm. Along the way, there is the complete digitization of all the official records for on-line viewing and storage on optical disk.
All the official records are stored on 16mm microfilm. The official records include deeds, titles, judgments, liens, wills, death certificates and military separation papers. Each official document has an official records book and page number. This is contained on the microfilmed copy. Hillsborough County started microfilming records in 1958. In December 1996 they had 8,411 official records books on 6,860 rolls of microfilm. Each roll has 2,000 images -- 13.7 million archived images.
Hillsborough has 900,000 people. They generate seven new rolls of microfilm each week. Documents required in title searches have to be available for 30 years. "We are digitizing our microfilm so images can be called up within a few seconds, instead of the time taken to locate the requisite roll of film, insert it in the viewer and find the correct frames," says Sherry Bowman, systems analyst.
They are working their way back from 1996 to 1970, while scanning currently generated microfilm. The project is expected to be finished by 2001. The scanned images, stored on optical and magnetic disk, will give centralized on-line access to 30 years of archival records. In the final phase of the project (early 1998) they'll scan the paper documents for day-forward official records and output them to magnetic disk.
They won't be abandon microfilm. "The Florida State Legislature has accepted optical disc as an archival solution, although it has to be re-copied every 10 years," says H. F. McLeod, Chief Deputy at the county. "We are taking a conservative approach, so that optical disc can become a fully proven and accepted technology. We want to consider the needs of the people who use our official records.
"We expect to complete the backfile conversion is 2001. We have researchers who don't want to move between two systems and we sell the roll microfilm to some title companies who are not ready to move to a digitized format. To accommodate these needs, we'll outsource the newly created digital images to16mm roll microfilm. We'll have the documents on both optical disc and microfilm."
Hillsborough County bought their system from Amitech (Springfield, VA 703-256-2020). It consists of Amitech's TurboScan software running a Mekel (Brea, CA 714-996-5600) microfilm scanner for the main production work and a ScreenScan (Novi, MI 810-380-6400) film scanner for rescans.
Their archival microfilm is all second generation. Although all the microfilming was originally done inhouse there is a surprising variation in quality, resulting from camera and equipment changes, personnel changes and aging chemicals. Hillsborough has three full-time employees working staggered eight-hour shifts.
"These employees are very knowledgeable," says Sherry Bowman. "They filmed and processed some of the original microfilm. They work very hard to get good quality digital images. At the moment they're working on negative diazo film. "
"They will soon be starting the earlier positive silver microfilm. This will cut their current daily output of seven to eight rolls of film to around five. The earlier film is more likely to have suffered degradation. This makes it harder and more time consuming to get good quality images."
The roll of microfilm is loaded onto the scanner. About 15-20 minutes is spent on setup. They get the best setting by fast forwarding through a random number of images within the first 500.
Once the scanner is set, the roll is automatically processed at 300 dpi (dots-per-inch) resolution using leading edge detection to capture all images (including those not blipped).The scanned images go directly to the magnetic disk drive of their Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, CA 650-857-1501) 9000 computer system.
The initial scan takes 65 minutes per roll, including set-up. TurboScan converts the microfilm images to batch data files. They use Amitech's Tools for rotation, cropping, deskewing, filtering in real-time -- without operator intervention.
Then the images are run through TurboResynch. This verifies the image page numbers for proper sequencing. TurboResynch deletes non-images including splices, target pages and duplicate images. One out of every 12 images is randomly reviewed and enhanced if necessary. To view every image on a roll would take a full eight hours.
Hillsborough County has tried different sample sizes (one in 24, one in eight). One in 12 (or 167 per 2,000 image roll) gives the best ratio of time spent reviewing versus image quality. The one in 12 viewing sequence takes 30 minutes per roll. Typical enhancements to images include darkening faint text, trimming book and blurred page numbers and straightening skewed text.
TurboQC performs a compression check on every image and flags as exceptions images that fall outside the normal range for file size, page height/width or other parameters. The images are reviewed and either accepted, modified and accepted, or rejected.
About 3% of viewed images are rejected. The image is displayed on the PC monitor and is re-scanned using ScreenScan from the film loaded on a Fuji (Elmsford, NY 914-789-8100) microfilm reader. The image, which is maximally enhanced, will only be saved if it's better than the original Mekel scan.
Once QC'd, the images are moved from the scan directory to the archive directories on their HP-9000 computer system. They are then copied to optical disk and DDS tape. The following day, after job statistics are reviewed for errors, the archive directories are purged.
In June 1997, Hillsborough County scanned 1,220 rolls of microfilm or 2.4 million images. They'll start scanning original paper documents in early 1998.
The index for the microfilmed records from 1965 is automated. It contains the book and page number, grantor and grantee name, instrument type, instrument number, legal description and recording date. Later this year, the index will be matched to the images using the book and page numbers contained within the directory structure and file names of the images. When the full index is completed, all documents will be viewed on-line within a few seconds.
The new records, scanned from paper, will be output to magnetic tape and converted at a service bureau to microfilm. Hillsborough County decided to outsource the microfilming because they'll generate 3,500-4,000 pages a day. Being able to output from digital to microfilm eliminates the problems of modifications to microfilm records.
"Normally court records are microfilmed several years after the case closes, but even so there are occasions when we have to add items to the original records," says McLeod.
"In a criminal case there may be a violation of the probation. In a civil case there may be a change in the terms of a child's custody. To include the addendum, we would cut and splice the roll film. This is difficult and expensive. Now we output the entire case record to tape and convert it to new microfilm. This gives us the best of the old and new worlds. "Hillsborough County will probably use microfilm well into the 21st century."
Ending the Paper Chase
The South Carolina Retirement Systems Division holds the retirement related documents for all state workers. These include nurses, teachers and firemen. The oldest records date back to 1945. They used imaging to clean up the tedious process of managing, updating and circulating their millions of records. They wanted to provide immediate access to their members.
The division used a jacketed microfilm system. Each jacket is associated with an original paper file. Up to 150 documents are stored on each member file. The jacketed microfilm are updated by inserting new files into the records. The jackets are barcoded to track through the system.
There are 150 employees at the division. Up to 17,000 folders can be signed out at any one time. They have forms for new enrollment, change of beneficiary, out of state service, maternity leave, leave of absence, benefit estimates, birth certificates, death certificates, insurance forms. There are the nine million member records on the jacketed fiche and three million accounting records on 1,400 rolls of roll film.
"We had two objectives," says Rich Payne, imaging information manager. "The first was to give multiple users access to the same file simultaneously. Before, a file at one department had to go the other, one user at a time. A document could be in transit for a full day.
"With imaging many people can see the folder at the same time. A counselor can work on it at the same time as someone in accounting. We also have a telephone bank in our customer service department for holders. With imaging we can give them quicker access to their file," says Payne.
With this the division would eliminate the need to track files. "We track files for visitor walk-in service," says Payne. "Locating the file in our office could take an hour. Now there's no waiting.
"We also track files for updating. There is incoming loose correspondence that needs to be processed through different depart- ments. Files were always in transit and needed to be tracked every time they change hands."
Their second objective was eliminating the microfiche and paper files. They keep the files on roll film. "We evaluated the microform we had and the demand for documents. In order to keep up with the different departments we image on demand," says Payne.
They began imaging in July 1996. The files on roll film are imaged as needed. "We will keep roll film forever. This information is from employers. We plan is to get rid of all the fiche," says Payne.
There are 1.5 million document images. One million of those are from microfiche. The rest are from paper. They use a Canon (Lake Success, NY 516-328-5000) MS 400 reader-printer/scanner. They are looking at the MS 500 for double the speed, double the productivity. The system is tied into a Visual Basic program that uses barcodes to create the index for the folder - name and social security number. They send images to an enhancement program from Seaport (San Jose, CA 408-366-6400) for despeckle, deskew and compression up to 90%.
Kofax (Irvine, CA 714-727-1733) indexing software applies indices to individual images using one of 18 generic indices from a drop down screen.
The users view on Optika's (Colorado Springs, CO 719-548-9800) FilePower DM viewer software. Anyone in the agency can see any fiche that's been imaged.
"Getting the users accustomed to the system was traumatic," says Payne. "The problem was user shock. People used to keep piles of folders on their desks. They had folders to contact and folders to review. This was no more. There was a lot of prior planning. We trained the users in culture change. We got them used to indexing on a system."
The division has cache to hold 48 GB, enough for six months worth of work. "We figured out that we needed enough cache to hold 500,000 documents," says Payne. "This gave real immediate retrieval as opposed to going to media storage. We also needed the speed of the MS 100. We have five running 10 hours a day."
The sixth scanner was dedicated to roll film. Any user can scan the roll film. "It's very easy to roll through and print one image. Users ask for an image, push the scan button and it throws the image on screen."
The division increased staff to make the transition. They picked a starting point for scanning the old film for 25 years or more state service. The new enrollers have no film.
They have a new system for backup that has four tiers. The index includes a box number telling them where the paper resides. They use RAID. There are HP optical jukeboxes on site. They make duplicates of optical discs and indexes for storage off-site. All fit state archive standards. The division received a 1997 innovation award for archives from the Department of Archive and History.
The infrastructure, including Pentium PCs, fiber optics and the LAN, was an older project. They spent $5 million on that. $1 million was for the management system. "We wanted the best of everything," says Payne.. We used a local integrator, Information Advantage (Lexington, SC 803-356-7676). They helped match everything. We were very pleased with the MS 400. It seamlessly tied in the indexing from the film to image."
Imaging at iQVC for a Better Shopping Experience
The next time you're searching the Internet, check out the Interactive QVC site (www.qvc.com). You may find that "have to have it" item. You have imaging to thank along with the people at iQVC. They have more than 100,000 products for sale on the Web. 30,000-40,000 of these images were conversions from various color hard copies.
In December of 1995 QVC started to create a warehouse of digital pictures. "We knew we were going to expand on iQVC and we had to have pictures to sell our products," says Holly Rutkowski, VP of iQVC. "We wanted all of our pictures from the vendors and distributors on-line."
They looked at eight imaging firms. "The staff at Conversion Technologies Int'l (Cherry Hill, NJ 609-482-0088) understood it had to be a quick job," says Rutkowski. "We wanted high quality images but not time consuming art. Many companies were not comfortable taking it on because of the volume.
"CTI never misses a deadline. They deal very well with the logistics. We had a huge mountain of paper on-site that we needed as images. We needed a competitive price. They understood the imaging packages out there. They're not trying to sell you any product, just the service. They also give the advice and expertise you want."
Besides the color prints, there were manufacturer spec sheets or original photos. They mark the pictures they want and the catalogues with the marked pictures in them. The service bureau standardizes them and prepares them for publishing.
"The service bureau lets us know if there's a problem with a specific image. We give them the index number with the images. They are indexed by product category and item number. If there's a discrepancy with the numbers they let us correct it before it goes in the system," says Rutkowski.
The service bureau sends them back a CD with the images. iQVC uploads the images to the Web server. The publishing is all done inhouse. Customers can search for products by categories, brand, item number or subject heading. They're also working on a feature finder, a new searching tool that brings up all the items with the features you need.
iQVC hopes to expand the system to their sales representatives for the QVC show.
"We looked very seriously at doing the conversion inhouse but the cost of buying all the equipment was the issue." Conversion Technologies used three different scanners from Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and Umax to handle the different size documents. They have the newest equipment and they gave us a very competitive price."
A Major Conversion for GTE's Employment Records
With revenues of more than $21 billion in 1996, GTE is one of the world's largest publicly held telecommunications companies. GTE has more than 65 million employee documents (45 million on paper), covering two million former employees.
GTE wanted to provide a single source for all inactive employee records. These records concern the management of the retirement benefits of the hundreds of thousands of GTE employees.
The Quincy Processing Center (QPC) of GTE started collecting inactive employee records in 1987. There are more than 800,000 inactive employee files at Quincy. All of these have been converted to microform by Spaulding (Stoughton, MA 617-828-8090). Many came from parts of GTE that had been divested.
All other human resource departments at GTE need Quincy to get information on these files. They are the link to the other HR departments and payroll to identify rehired employees. With an imaging indexing system all HR staff can identify a rehired employee and get them back in the system with all the information from their files.
They are collecting files from the HR departments of all GTE business divisions for centralized storage of all inactive employee records. Inactive employee records go back to the 1950s. There are almost two million records, 45 million pages. Each division has its own system to manage these files. Spaulding is converting them to a standardized form for uniform indexing and storage.
The records are converted to 16mm microfilm. The records can be on paper, microfilm or microfiche. Spaulding indexes, preps, films, copies and disposes of paper. They have indexed 400,000 files so far. The collection process is tedious.
"We look for the old records," says Dave Farley, project manager. "The boxes are barcoded and shipped to Spaulding where they index by name, Social Security number and box number so we know which boxes were done. They get them ready for filming, quality control and indexing to roll and blip. They then copy and store a master copy of film there and deliver the film and index discs to us."
Spaulding preindexes the files while they're working on them. "This is so we still have a way of keeping track of them. If we have to get it, Spaulding will find it for us and send it back," says Farley.
They currently use a Unisearch indexing system from Com Squared (Atlanta, GA 770-263-4990). It will be replaced with a PC programming environment based on Windows NT. They will custom develop an indexing system. It will be running at QPC but will eventually roll out to all other human resource departments.
"There are files that probably will never be looked at again," says Dave Farley. "That's why we chose microfilm. For active employees we will image."
They are filming all former GTE personnel and pension records so the staff can look them up on an index system. Two Minolta Microdax 3000 reader/scanners let the staff scan the film images and email or fax a response to a request. Three Minolta 605z reader/printers are used to find, view, print and fax or image and email.
They will image the files for a past employee who gets rehired and put it into an active employee imaging system. GTE has a larger plan to create an Employee Records Service Center that will include active and inactive employee records for both HR and Payroll.
GTE uses Spaulding for all the filming. "The cost of looking through all the files to find what to throw away would cost more than the filming," says Farley.
"Although Spaulding's quote was higher than many of the other vendors, we chose them because of their reliability and solid relationship with us over the past eight years." Spaulding microfilmed the 17 million documents for the QPC. "They have resolved several technical problems with microfilm and microfiche records received at the QPC from the GTE business units," says Farley.
"We invested $60,000 on the new equipment. We already had the two Microdax reader/scanners. There are several other costs that come from the man hours, travel to the other GTE offices, shipping and warehousing. We saved labor and storage space for the other GTE HR locations. We've also improved customer service by having just one single index containing all the inactive employees.
"The biggest challenge has been the task of standardization across the different departments of the company. This is where Spaulding has been the most useful. We do a quality check here and at Spaulding.
"We had little adjustment. The staff was already doing this for the divested companies. They had three years minimum experience with us using the film and the index and procedures. Overall we are very pleased with the results," says Farley. "There is a growing number of inquiries each month as more locations are added to the system."
Nuclear Energy Site
Powers Up
When a nuclear power station powers-down the reactor for scheduled maintainance, fast access to the latest revisions of documents is vital. At Sizewell B, Britain's first pressurized water reactor, a Cimage (Bracknell, Berkshire 441-344-860055) EDMS system provides the required access.
To make sure they had the latest revision, they needed to scan 30,000 aperture card drawings in three weeks. The Capture Centre (Bracknell, Berkshire, 441-344-867699), was tasked with scanning, quality checking, re-scanning and index linking 2,000 documents per day, on-site.
The Capture Center decided to use Wicks & Wilson's (Basingstoke, Hampshire 441-256-842211) 3400 Scan Station for the task. "The 3400 is portable and gives scans a high proportion of good images on the first pass," says Jacqueline Austin, The Capture Center's operations director. "It ran continuously with hardly a misfeed." When the estimated 30,000 cards rose to 40,000, the task was still completed in less than four weeks.
"These were all the documents that covered the engineering side for drawings, repair, replacement and maintainance. They wanted all of these documents in electronic format to meet maintainance schedules," says Austin.
The reactor was built in 1992. A previous vendor filmed the first 20,000 documents. These were mostly older documents. "They were very poorly filmed," says Austin. "They were skewed, with bad contrast. We did 17,000 out of those for usable images."
The remaining 20,000 documents were new and in good shape on A2 size aperture cards. They hold data on the card. This is good for the drawings because they have no text within them for indexing. They're also easier to index when scanned. They're on a database indexed by drawing number, source, sheet number and title.
They also scanned the large format paper and may begin scanning all paper. For on-line access they use the Cimage system, an Oracle database and a Unix server.
"We ran into problems with the quality of poor images," says Austin. "On the 3400 Scan Station every single image was brought up for quality check by reading the image and the text file."
"They did an excellent job," says Tony Sheard, commercial manager at Sizewell. "We weren't sure that they could meet such a tight time frame and keep the quality and accuracy we had to have."
