Expert: Amy - 7/27/2004

Question
Hi Dear Sir
that's me again. sorry. the correct address is
http://www.ifla.org/VI/5/op/udtop11/udtop11.htm
your sincerely
fatemeh

Answer
Hi Fatemah,

I'm not a Sir, I'm a ma'am!

Interesting article.  

Resource Overhead is simply the cost to create and store files.

What they're trying to say is that if you choose a TIFF for your electric file format, there are a number of things about that file format that add up to give it a low to moderate overhead cost:

1) cost in terms of training people to use the scanner or the software and

2) the cost of the time it takes to scan (pay an employee hourly to do it)

3) cost of the scanning equipment.

4) cost of the software used to adjust the TIFF image if it needs adjusting to be more legible (Adobe PhotoShop for example).

5) The file size and the cost of storing and retrieving hundreds of thousands of those files from storage devices.
 TIFFs are fairly large files and require a lot of space.

On a scale from

low  ----->  moderate  -----> high

with low being the least expensive and high being the most expensive, TIFFs fall between low and moderate on the Resource Overhead scale.

They want you to choose the file format for electronic file storage based on a number of things, though, not just cost of creating/storing.

In my opinion, the worst couple of things about TIFFs are that not all browsers are set up to view them without plugins and second, if there is any textual data in the file, it is converted to raster data when scanned, in other words, you can't edit it.  But it does offer the best resolution and when I worked at a large University in Michigan, we used TIFFs to electronically store all our invoices because of the great image quality.

Thanks for sharing that article with me.  Let me know if you have more questions.

-Amy Pace