Any company or organization still sitting on a storage space packed full of microfiche or microfilm no doubt has heard about microfiche scanning. For many, it seems easier to stick with what is familiar and wait to invest in scanning until some point down the line. The longer you wait to scan your documents, the more money you’ll have wasted and the more risk you’ll have exposed your documents to. Here are just a few reasons to invest in your microfiche scanning now instead of later.
Cost Efficiency
Upkeep costs of microfiche are inherently higher than digital copies—not only do they take up valuable space, microfiche documents require additional climate control and require you to maintain technology long past its prime. As the technology becomes increasingly unpopular and dated, it’s only going to become more expensive to keep your legacy documents intact and accessible. If you get microfiche scanning out of the way now, you get to sidestep all those expenses further down the line.
It’s also substantially easier to retrieve documents that have been scanned to a digital format. You won’t need to spend valuable time and effort searching through microfiche for the images you need—which means you can spend that time on more important tasks than poring over a collection of microfiche documents. It’s a small gain in efficiency that adds up over time—more than enough to make investing in microfiche scanning a savvy expenditure.
Safety
Physical files are always going to be at risk of destruction; there are simply too many ways a document on microfiche can be lost forever, from simple accidents around the office to major events such as flooding or a fire. Keeping backup copies can alleviate the risk of completely losing your data, but that only compounds the other problems on this list.
Even in the absence of catastrophic destruction, microfiche deteriorates over time—even with perfect care. That means that the longer you wait for microfiche scanning, the worse the copies you’ll have in hand for the future.
Security
While digital intrusions are certainly an issue, a well-secured file on your computer is still many, many times safer than that document on microfiche could ever be. It’s simply too easy for microfiche documents to go missing unnoticed or for an unscrupulous individual to take advantage of a few minutes where the documents aren’t under lock and key.
This is also an issue of cost to consider. Properly securing and protecting microfiche against unwanted access costs money. If you’re not spending that money, your files aren’t secure. Either way, microfiche scanning resolves the issue quite elegantly.
Sharing
It’s a massive headache to create and distribute copies of a document stored to microfiche. Compare this to the simplicity of sharing that same document after availing yourself of microfiche scanning services. At this point, it becomes as simple to share as any other picture or document on your computer.
It’s also far easier to maintain security when sharing digital documents, as you can use various password protections and access controls to make sure that file is only ever accessed by people who ought to access it—no matter how much it gets passed around.
There are many reasons to invest in microfiche scanning services as soon as possible, the longer you wait, the more risk and waste you take on in service to microfiche.