District Council Reduced Costs with our Microfiche Services

West Lindsey District Council is a local government district in Lincolnshire. Its council is based in Gainsborough.

Storetec won a tender through ESPO to provide microfiche scanning services for the West Lindsey District Council. The council had an archive of historic microfiche jackets from 1974 to 2000 with planning application data and plans that needed converting to electronic PDF files. The storage cabinets and microfilm readers took up a lot of office space, and the equipment cost a lot to maintain. Also, the information contained was inaccessible to them while working from home, so the staff was wasting time traveling to retrieve it. They needed the electronic files to be imported into their new corporate document management system.

We digitised various types of microfiche on behalf of the council to free up storage space and facilitate searching. Once digitised, the resulting images were indexed and structured in line with the council’s requirements and securely transferred for management internally by the council.

Converting physical microfiche into electronic format enabled West Lindsey Council to easily access their documents without the need to attend the office, especially over the last two years when this was restricted; it was a big improvement. They have now freed up the space the microfilm reader, and cabinets took up and have reduced costs because they don’t need to maintain the equipment. All planning files are now in one repository for easy digital access. The council was so happy with the work Storetec did that they had additional council tax and housing microfiche scanned as well, which are now accessible to staff too.