Paper prevails over electronic documents - 0 views
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"Despite the fact that the legal admissibility of scanned paper documents has been established for nearly 20 years and is nailed down in legislation and standards around the world, there is still this suspicion among users that they may need to produce the original paper copy at some stage," Mancini said. The survey also found that many documents are "born digital," then printed out to be signed and later scanned into document systems.
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Office employees are loath to give up the vast amount of paper stored in their filing cabinets, much to the chagrin of companies that sell scanners and electronic document management systems. A recent survey by AIIM, an industry association representing vendors of such products, found that 62% of important documents are still archived in paper form. Even when documents are sent off to be scanned for archiving, 25% are photocopied beforehand "just in case," the survey found. -
And no wonder. We know that "quality" paper will last for hundreds of years through a wide variety of conditions. Even "cheap" and/or abused paper can still be marginally useful (or have information from it recovered with extreme means). Generally NOT so with electronic media. Remember NASA's sad loss of terabytes of space data stored on tape? And then there is the real (as little as 2 years) verses the touted (20 to 100 years) lifetime of optical disks of various sorts. From http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/temp-opmedia-faq.html - CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer. However, a variety of factors discussed in the sources cited in FAQ 15, below, may result in a much shorter life span for CDs/DVDs. Life expectancies are statistically based; any specific medium may experience a critical failure before its life expectancy is reached. Additionally, the quality of your storage environment may increase or decrease the life expectancy of the media. We recommend testing your media at least every two years to assure your records are still readable.
