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Why Use Digital Imaging? Most of us store lots of paper on our desks, on shelves, in filing cabinets, and perhaps in central long-term storage away from our individual offices, possibly in a different building. With less paper around, you might be able to do with fewer filing cabinets, saving the cost of the cabinet and the floor space it occupies. While paper sits on your desk, it isn’t reasonable to include the cost of the desk and the space it uses as part of the cost of paper as you’d need a desk regardless of how much paper you use. To get a handle on your paper storage costs, first count, or estimate, the number of file cabinets you have. You can measure or estimate how much floor area they occupy. A common footprint for a file cabinet is 2.5 ft2, though if you count the space an open drawer uses, you might double this figure. Multiply by the value of that floor area and you might get a cost from $25 to $100 per year for the space. Assuming 2,000 sheets/foot of file space, a typical 4-drawer cabinet might have a capacity of 16,000 sheets. Assuming it is just 75% full, it would contain 12,000 sheets or 24 reams. At $2.50/ream, this is $60 of paper, and so the value of the floor area is often comparable to an annual paper purchase cost of the paper in it. While the file cabinet itself lasts many years, it costs several times the cost of this paper, so is notable, but less than the paper or floor area cost. All of these usually pale in comparison to the value of the time spent filing and retrieving papers from the file cabinet. All traditional means of storage media degrade with time due to use, dirt, loss and ageing and usually incur costs at the same time! All physical media like paper, polyester, linen, color prints and negatives are susceptible to fire, water, or physical loss. It may also require a large storage area. There is also the more likely risk of loss by miss filing on return to the archive system. Only one person is able to view the document at a time unless more copies are made and the image size may be too small or too large for the current purpose. Unfortunately, we often need to keep the data for long periods for example, personnel records, e.g. expense forms are required by law to be held for seven years after an employee leaves a company. The National Archives and Records Administration is a rare organization that has managing office paper as one of its primary missions. NARA estimates the cost for storing paper in ordinary offices and in warehouse-like "Federal Records Centers". The following data are from 1996. U.S. records management professionals measure storage in cubic feet (ft3). A cubic foot of paper records is approximately a stack of paper a foot high or one foot of a file cabinet drawer. For office space, a cubic foot of records was estimated to cost $23.24, about 98% of which is the rental cost of the office space. For the Records Center, the cost was $1.56/ft3. In both cases, that is only the cost of leaving the records in place for many years. The cost of employee time to prepare the records for storage, access them as needed, and determine when they can be disposed of is usually much larger. The figure below shows many of the copy paper flows through a typical office.
Each sheet passes through several important stages, and it can be measured at any step along the way. Try to measure all of them and see what you come up with. As you inventory paper, try to gather the following:
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