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Re: scanning fees



     Over the past year my department has spent a lot of time considering
     this issue.  We finally came up with a scanning policy (if anyone
     wants to see it email me and i'll send it to you) that boils down to
     this:

     We will scan for free with no guarantees on how long it is going to
     take with a really large order--as a government institution we can't
     make a profit off of this and we plan to scan everything eventually
     anyway.  (I know, I laughed hysterically at that at first too, but we
     are a very small place and we've got three volunteers coming in to
     scan so I usually just hand the orders off to them.  Plus, everybody
     has certain images that keep getting requested over and over and once
     they are scanned, you don't have to do it again).

     However, we don't have to fund this for researchers so we charge $1.00
     per floppy disk and $20.00 per zip disk then we just try to fit as
     much as possible on it.  We don't let them provide the disks for fear
     of viruses and once they have taken the disk we gave them out of here
     we won't put it back in the computers.  Which actually sounds sort of
     ridiculous as I sit here typing it out, but we have to protect our
     computers.

     The idea when we started this was to provide scans for free if you
     requested delivery by email since all it would cost us is time we
     would be scanning some image in our collections anyway.  However, this
     part hasn't worked so well.  I have personally crashed the email
     system for our whole park a few times now.  Not only that, even if
     your email can handle it, there is no guarantee theirs will.  I had
     some poor panicked students with a deadline fast approaching and the
     girl's hotmail account simply wouldn't accept the email.

     Our most successful part of all of this is that once the things are
     scanned we will sell printouts from our inkjet printer on nice photo
     paper for MUCH MUCH cheaper than photo reproduction.  We are charging
     $2.00 for an 8 x 10 and $4.00 for an 11 x 17.  And if they pick images
     we've already scanned or only want one or two that we can do right
     away this is a lot faster than waiting for the photo to come back from
     the lab.

     Sorry, I'm just going on and on about this but it really took a lot of
     time and effort to come up with our policies.  I am enjoying hearing
     about other institution's decisions....


     Jen Rawlings
     Archivist
     Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
     St. Louis, MO
     jeff_archivist@nps.gov

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