[Spooky23]

Do you have a detailed cost estimate?

New York government entities are required to use preferred source vendors (usually workshops for disabled people) for certain items when an item or service is available, including scanning. Preferred source vendors aren’t competitively bid and must be used by law.

When I was in school, paper copies of fiche from the state archives cost like $1-1.50 per fiche.

If you do some googling you can find various descriptions of issues, including cost, associated with that in the context of scanning.

[Asparagirl]

”Do you have a detailed cost estimate?”

Indeed we do! Several pages, including methodology. Here you go: https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10...

Just a quick sample: ”By way of background, our research would indicate the industry standard for fees for a job of this size – turning existing microfiche sheets into scanned digital images – would be approximately $3,000, not $152,000. This would indicate that DOH’s requested fees to process this FOIL request are nearly fifty times higher than actual costs...”

[Spooky23]

I admire your mission and understand your approach.

My only comment for what it's worth is that you may want to pursue a different path for these historical records. Using FOIL to access archival records is not a cost-efficient strategy for any stakeholder.

In my opinion, as an observer with no skin in the game is that investing the legal resources you have and working with someone like the library association to lobby the legislature to fund digitization would perhaps be a more productive avenue.

When I look at your website, and find the headline "CORRUPTION'S SUCH AN OLD SONG THAT WE CAN SING ALONG IN HARMONY, AND NOWHERE IS IT STRONGER THAN IN ALBANY" with respect to the city clerk office in a tiny place like Albany, NY. I take pause when I see that.

A handful of old ladies processing dog licenses in a broke upstate city isn't clutching to old death records to help big companies, particularly for data they may not even possess. Albany is not NYC, and the approach your org seems to take is like bringing a stereotype to life.

[Asparagirl]

The costs to a city, county, or state agency for digitization under state Freedom of Information laws is zero dollars.

The costs of records requests are entirely borne by the requestor. We pay for the copies (but only the actual duplication costs, no mark-up allowed), we pay for the labor (at the government worker’s actual salary), we pay for the physical media like a USB hard drive or DVD’s, we pay for the shipping.

All the clerk needs to do is agree that the Freedom of Information request is legitimate and not prohibited by any exceptions to the law. And for that, the government employee has free legal counsel available to them in New York, in the form of the Committee on Open Government (COOG), which provides free Advisory Opinions of questions of the law. They answer questions by both e-mail and phone within 24-48 hours, from both requestors and agencies. Other states have similar programs available.

So yeah, this digitization is actually totally free to the government. We bear the costs, not them.

...unless they ignore the law entirely, in which case they get the pleasure of paying for their attorneys, and our attorney fees too. We’ve won those twice so far.

(by the way, the “corruption” in Albany line is a song lyric from the musical “Hamilton”)

[privateSFacct]

100% false, you literally cannot even write the RFP to bid a scanning job for $3,000.

This is classic from folks like this. They are always like, here - you do the work, it will only cost $3,000.

The state should seriously offer them this deal. You properly bid, contract, insure, fight the appeals, do all the specialized hiring, handle all the HR and disability and other claims and scan the 100 years of records for $3,000 while working weird hours with a unionized workforce.

[Asparagirl]

Again, you seem to be under some misapprehension that we are a company or are “bidding” on a project. Please educate yourself about state Freedom of Information Laws or Sunshine Laws.

We appreciate hearing that our work is “impossible” from people like you, especially since we’ve been doing it very successfully for four years now, and have so far put over 25,000,000 records online for totally free public use. This includes acquiring and publishing millions of records in New York City alone: marriage license indices from two different agencies, voter lists, and so on...

And we did it at a very reasonable $35 or $37 per microfilm roll. Because that’s what the law requires.

And thanks to the generosity of the Internet Archive, we don’t even have any server storage bills.

[privateSFacct]

If you are telling a government agency what it will cost them to do the work, you are "bidding" the project. Does that not make sense?

I don't understand why you want them to do the work. How is it more cost effective to have the government do the work then to just do it yourself?

I'll answer this question, it is not. I 100% guarantee that ancestry, if they brought in their own staff or standard partner to do this, paid a LOT less then whatever the goverment would have charged you.

And then you got things for free. And are suing over this.

Let me make a suggestion. Follow the ancestry model. Offer a free service to agencies, backed with some quality, and if you then give them even a hard drive with the images you will make them very very happy. Seriously.

On the other hand, if you tell them to do something they don't know how to do, and then sue them when they don't do it the way you want, you will be helping to make the world worse off.

I did look at the fiche count, I will say, that's a very small job. That's where you will most likely see the biggest cost difference between doing it yourself and having them do a one off.

[toomuchtodo]

> Let me make a suggestion. Follow the ancestry model. Offer a free service to agencies, backed with some quality, and if you then give them even a hard drive with the images you will make them very very happy. Seriously.

This advice is terrible, and Asparagirl has every right to hold government to the standard the law demands, as well as ensuring certain requestors are not receiving preferential treatment.