physical drawing storage

[stephen80]

so i have been at my company for about 7 years now and i'm the only full time draftsmen. so i'm responsible for everything including archiving all our old drawings. i have finally gotten to the point where it doesn't seem like i will be pulling double duty being a dafter and production tech for a little bit so i have the time to tackle the huge issue they have with file management. i was wondering if anyone had any better ideas for storage of the physical drawings besides rolling them up and putting them in a bankers box. they are mainly "D" and "C" size. i think we are around 50,000 in storage not to mention all actual production folders with the same drawings stored in there too. i know my options are limited either roll them up or lay them flat in a shelf or drawer type storage. just seeing what you might think is best to continue moving forward with.

[ReMark]

Talk with whoever is in charge and see if they would be open to having the drawings scanned. Then you can ditch the physical copies.

[David Bethel]

How often do you need to access these ?

[stephen80]

How often do you need to access these ?

 

not often, its only when some city has cabinet that is older than i am and some animal has decided to make the documents its nest. or if we need to re-quote.

[ReMark]

Is offsite storage an option?

[stephen80]

Talk with whoever is in charge and see if they would be open to having the drawings scanned. Then you can ditch the physical copies.

 

see the recent files are all still accessible via cad, its some "policy" and or crazy thought hey lets keep everything from every job we have ever done in the 30+ years the company has been in business. i spent the about two weeks reorganizing the file room, and we have job folders from the late 70's and early 80's and not one thing in those folders are used today, everything is obsolete. yet why do we have boxes full of full of obsolete information.

[ReMark]

Maybe it is kept for historical purposes. Have you asked anyone?

[stephen80]

no, i think scanning might be a viable option though. i would only have to scan up until i think late 90's. but even our autoCAD/pdf/computer file structure is all jacked up. they sort of let the drafters have control over it and they just did whatever and never followed what the previous one did. its been tasking over the last 7 years to sort through it all and find stuff and remember where everything is.

[stephen80]

Maybe it is kept for historical purposes. Have you asked anyone?

 

historical, idk for what. i have asked and its like they dont see a problem because they dont have or want to deal with it. we will run out of space, its a total mess, some people put stuff back when they are done, some don't.

[David Bethel]

I have never personally seen anything that I would call efficient. Flat drawers, hanging racks, PVC pipe storage. Do you do your large format printing in house ? If so you might want to look into an in house scanner / plotter / copier

[stephen80]

I have never personally seen anything that I would call efficient. Flat drawers, hanging racks, PVC pipe storage. Do you do your large format printing in house ? If so you might want to look into an in house scanner / plotter / copier

 

everything is in house, we do have a scanner (very old) i attempted to upgrade a few years ago when our plotter took a dump. but the vp of engineering didn't like the 20k+ price tag of a plotter scanner combo with some software that would have taken care of the current situation.

[ReMark]

You could always contact a local reprographics company and ask for a price quote on scanning 100 documents at a time and see what the turn-around time would be and the cost per sheet. Spread the whole thing out over a period of time and just keep whittling away at it.