Fiche Scanner Contract

We are looking to purchase an automated scanner, Mekel Mach7 to digitise our historic Fiche records.

Planning has at least 500,000 Microfiche slides with planning records dating back to 1947. These are scanned and converted to digital copies as required for property searches, but the slides are getting old, and many are deteriorating quite rapidly. Currently the scanner used is a manual one which requires each image to be located by hand, a rectangle drawn arounds the image and then for each image to be scanned individually. There may be around 20 images on each slide, so about 10 million images to scan in total. This is many decades of work. Cornwall Council is the largest planning authority in the Country and as such has more planning records than most other authorities.