Interviews

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 02 - April 2010

Last year Genus bought out its largest microfilm business competitor, Germany's MikrofilmHaus, creating one of Europe's largest independent micrographics specialist suppliers.

But Genus has far more wide-reaching plans for 2010 and beyond, as their MD Paul Negus tells DM Editor David Tyler

David Tyler: Genus IT represents a broader solution offering than your traditional brand, the Microfilm Shop. How has your business diversified?

Paul Negus: The acquisition of MikrofilmHaus in 2009, which makes us the largest in our sector in Europe, gives us a kind of 'safety net' of ongoing microfilm business. But we've already been selling document scanners, software, and book scanners for some five years, so it makes more sense now for us to be branded as Genus than as the Microfilm Shop brand that has served us so well since the 1970s. So Genus now encompasses not just the Microfilm Shop but also our Imaging Technology Group (book & document scanning), Graphic Press (print), and our Large Format Division offering solutions to the engineering sector. Then our Service Division, which has grown substantially in recent years, exists to service all the different equipment we now have to support across all those markets. We are positioning Genus now as a Document Lifecycle company: offering solutions to print, scan, and archive information. And in fact in this context microfilm is undergoing new growth: taking digital documents and writing them back down to film. A good example is the 2011 UK Census: all the census data is to be scanned using high volume scanners, and OCR will be used to extract demographic information for use by the Office for National Statistics. But of course that information won't be made available to the public for 70 years - so what to do with it? Should they keep migrating the data from one imaging technology to the next? Or put it onto an analogue medium - microfilm - whereby in 70 years it doesn't actually matter how technology has moved on? Bring out the microfilm, scan it, and you have your digital copy. Even now, a roll of microfilm - that's 2,500 documents - can be scanned in under 5 minutes: quicker than the fastest high volume scanners. DT: The mere mention of the word 'microfilm' can have connotations of a technology that is past its use-by-date - can you explain why it actually still has a major part to play in even the most modern of organisations?

PN: Microfilm offers a reliable safety net when organisations require a long term solution over 30 or 40 years-plus. And there is more and more information that has to be kept almost indefinitely now: patient records, plans for nuclear plants, mortgage deeds etc. On that note, we've been involved in drafting the document 'The Role of Microfilm In Digital Preservation" on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre (www.dcc.ac.uk), for their Curation Reference Manual, the best-practice bible of digital curation techniques - there is a lot of interest out there.

Over the last two or three years we've seen eighteen new pieces of digital-to-microfilm equipment come on the market, so there is clearly a growing market for writing images to microfilm. Because of our long history in that market it's been easy for us to offer an advisory service to customers, and the basic message is simple: if you want to archive information then microfilm it, and if you want to distribute it, then digitalise it. Digital beats microfilm hands-down in terms of distribution of information, but it's awful for genuinely long-term archival. What we can offer is a unique combination of solutions: most customers, of course, require some mixture of distributed and archived information.

DT: Are these new archival offerings being primarily driven by demand from your traditional user base, or are there new markets opening up as well? PN: Traditionally our customers have been predominantly bureaux and facilities management companies, but these days around 60% of our turnover is direct from end users such as national archives and libraries, as well as banks, insurance companies, building societies and the like. These users have all traditionally had microfilm systems in place, and are now looking at imaging solutions, so we are very well placed to be advising them on the most appropriate approach for the future. That might include off-the-shelf document management packages and even web-based solutions.

Another recent growth area has been in colour microfilm, which was previously perceived as having a shelf-life of only 60 or 70 years; but now Ilford, the makers, are claiming a 500 year life expectancy (LE) rating. This means that customers such as nuclear power plants with CAD drawings - where the colour element could be critical to the data - have an affordable, effective solution available. Again we have seen several manufacturers bringing out new kit to write to colour microfilm - proving the demand is there for integrated DM and archival solutions.

The challenge for us as Genus IT is to maintain our core business and fit it in with our broader document lifecycle offering. There is no question that microfilm has a place in the archiving arena - what we can offer is a way to make it seamlessly fit in an imaging-based environment.

More info: www.genusit.com

Interviews