Published: July 02, 2008 11:55 am         

Documents

Digital effort a welcome move

Dave Arnold and his fellow county commissioners deserve a pat on the back for their plan to convert the thousands of paper documents in the county building into digital files.

As it now stands, the various county offices have documents stored in various places throughout the building. In some offices, boxes are stacked five or six high, and finding documents at the bottom of the stack can be a time-consuming process.

There are also security issues, for both the documents themselves and the information they contain. In most cases, there is only one copy of a file, and a disaster such as a fire or a flood could wipe out years of irreplaceable records.

There is also the valuable office space being taken up by box after box of old records.

Getting the system up and running will cost the county $70,342, including $32,186 for the imaging equipment and $19,140 annually for one full-time employee to handle the scanning. Arnold says the commissioners will ask for an appropriation at this month’s council meeting.

Imaging Office System Inc., the same company that is already converting records at the Cass County Jail, will handle the conversion.

The company’s plan is to start with the most current documents and work backward. Where possible, the county will shred the paper documents to cut down on the number of boxes filled with paperwork.

The process will begin with the courts and then move to the prosecutor, public defender and probation office. The assessor’s, auditor’s and treasurer’s offices will be next.

This move toward digital files won’t happen overnight, but in perhaps two years the county will begin scanning documents into the computer as soon as they’re filed.

With the current paper system, retrieving a document can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour. Company representatives say the digital system will cut that time to 15 seconds.

And the system eventually will be accessible from the Internet, meaning that residents will be able to access county records from their computers rather than having to make a trip to the courthouse.

The system marks a great step forward, and it helps to solve a space crunch that stood only to get worse with the passage of time.

Congratulations to county officials on their efforts.