Digitizing the records would be great but there are millions of them. It would probably take years to go through them all, and who knows how much that would cost. As pointed out back on the first page of this discussion:
Let's look at the numbers.
Pontiac built nearly seven million vehicles between 1961 and 1970. At 10 cents per image, that works out to nearly $700,000. If you expand the year count to 1980, you will more than double that figure.
If you could image each Billing History Card or Dealer Invoice at the rate of one per second, it would take one person, working 40 true hours per week, almost a year to complete the image recording. If the actual rate increased to 2 or 3 seconds per image, that would turn out to be a substantially lengthy effort.
Now that you've got that first decade digitized, you can start figuring the cost/time requirement for the OCR phase.
This has always figured as a massive project in time and money. Until the reader/printer that PHS is using at the moment has a fatal breakdown and no repair parts can be located, thus rendering the existing microfilm cassettes useless in their current form, there is no reason for PHS to venture away from the satus quo. However, if or when that unfortunate turn of events comes about, PHS will have a decision to make, but, it is their decision to make.
|