[68gtoMN]

Originally Posted by gtoric

Kurt, all of the PHS records are on microfilm. The film has been wound into special cassettes that can only be used by the reader/printer that Jim has. You can see the machine in Mike's picture of the former PHS offices. I think that these reader/printers are over 40 years old, and repair parts are getting scarce.

Eric,

This is what I thought and I did see the reader in the picture. The fact that these machines were used originally is not an issue. There are specific Microfiche scanners built for exactly this conversion. As an example, I looked up some sample costs were you to have a service produce the conversions. If Std 16MM film, and with the number of rolls to be scanned (greater than 50, I surmise) the price for each would be $0.10 per image or less. Again, depends on volume. The undertaking would be larger than I first imagined; still, this would set up the company for increased efficiency and new product/revenue streams going forward. It is tough to make financial assumptions here, but I believe I could build a business case for this in a heartbeat.

[gtoric]

Originally Posted by 68gtoMN

Eric,

This is what I thought and I did see the reader in the picture. The fact that these machines were used originally is not an issue. There are specific Microfiche scanners built for exactly this conversion. As an example, I looked up some sample costs were you to have a service produce the conversions. If Std 16MM film, and with the number of rolls to be scanned (greater than 50, I surmise) the price for each would be $0.10 per image or less. Again, depends on volume. The undertaking would be larger than I first imagined; still, this would set up the company for increased efficiency and new product/revenue streams going forward. It is tough to make financial assumptions here, but I believe I could build a business case for this in a heartbeat.

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.