Whether the initial push has been from legislation or just a county clerk that wants to get things done, we’ve seen a constant push to make more records available online to the public. This was even the case before pandemic-related funds were made available to keep government offices functioning in a remote capacity. (Read more: The CARES Act is Getting Records Digitized)
Regardless of the impetus for these projects, they continue to be completed, giving constituents more access to documents. Two recent projects to highlight are the ones from Hennepin County, MN and Bergen County, NJ.
Continued Progress
Hennepin County has land records they want to digitize dating all the way back to 1855. The first big set of documents scanned by the county was seven million pages from the county attorney’s office, which took two years and drove a push to continue digitization. A staff of seven in the imaging department is now up to 20 as the county is tackling these projects in-house. The old land records pose an additional challenge as compared to the legal documents as their condition has deteriorated over the course of nearly two centuries. Staff are removing things like staples and trying to tame frayed edges to reduce issues when scanning. The county is even using somewhat dated scanning technology over fears that the speed of new scanners could damage the records.
Because of the speed of the scanning, rescans when things don’t come out legibly, and the general manual nature of this project, the county estimates it will take five years, even with the larger imaging staff. It’s important that the project has gotten started though, as the paper records won’t have much life left in them and Hennepin has another 27,000 bankers boxes of records to process. That it has held up this long is a good sign though, and the staff notes that even fragile documents made of onion-skin paper a hundred years ago have held up better than anything sent via fax more recently.
A Finished Project
Bergen County Clerk John Hogan amongst the thousands of records. (Source: Northjersey.com)
If the staff at Hennepin County are looking for an idea of what the finish line looks like, they can see what Bergen County, NJ has done. The 26,000 physical books of documents that were scanned had records dating back to the 1800s. While Hennepin has bankers boxes instead of books, they should still be comforted by the fact that Bergen County also completed their process entirely with in-house staff. Bergen County Clerk John Hogan was quoted $4 million to outsource the project, but preferring not to have the records leave the office, his staff took on the work.
Bergen County had issues with document quality in some of the older records, which required additional care, but the newer books were scanned in hours. Once everything was scanned, his staff had to go through a redaction process, ensuring that there were no social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, or any other type of personally identifiable information contained in the millions of pages.
The process was also slowed by the pandemic and new legislation, like a bill that shields personal information for a variety of public servants. The county has pushed through their challenges though, and even added constituent-friendly features like alerting when your property is being searched.
Automation Streamlines
The labor of scanning these documents and the comfort levels associated with outsourcing or doing it all yourself will vary based on the age and quality of the physical files. Where you can speed things up is in ensuring your digital files are ready to be presented to the public.
Extract offers automated redaction software that converts image files to text and then interprets the data based on factors additional to just the exact text like spatial positioning, surrounding clues, fuzzy term searches, machine learning, and other technology to automate the redaction (and indexing) process as much as possible. Nothing needs to leave your office either, not even the digital files. You can even configure things to easily apply new redactions to your existing files in response to legislative changes. We’ve helped hundreds of counties and would be happy to help yours.
If you’d like to learn more about how automation software could streamline your county’s workflow, please send us a message and we’d be happy to give you a personalized demonstration or answer any questions you might have.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.