Published: May 14, 2008 10:42 pm            

Vigo County still pursuing paperless system

TERRE HAUTE — Enacting a program to digitally scan and archive a growing number of Vigo County paper documents has become a costly and unproductive task.

Now a committee of the County Council is working to get the big picture on costs that would allow the county eventually to move to a paperless document system.

The largest number of documents generated annually are from the county courts.

County officials first started the process in 2004 by hiring a company to scan and transfer documents into an electronic database. The company, WK2& Associates, failed to pay workers federal tax withholdings in 2005 resulting in the county in 2006 paying about $9,100 to the U.S. Treasury after the Internal Revenue Service filed a federal tax levy.

In the end, the county paid more than $491,700 for contract work that included a database that ultimately was not compatible with Vigo County’s main computer system. The county continues to pay about $10,000 a month for storage of records in a building at Sixth Street and Wabash Avenue.

Those records were removed from the County Courthouse as part of an interior renovation project.

Records, ranging from ledger books and docket sheets to case files, continued to stack up, finally causing storage shelving to collapse in early April. The building also contains 533 filing cabinets, of which 475 cabinets contain court records. Now, those records are slated to be moved into a county-owned building near 13th and Crawford streets.

County officials in February learned ways to dispose instantly of some court documents, dating from 1989 to 1993, from John Newman, director of information management for the Indiana Division of State Court Administration.

Newman recommended the scanning, then microfilming of about 2,500 volumes of ledgers, which then could be destroyed, freeing up about 75 shelving units of space. During the past three weeks, four temporary workers have worked to remove and destroy 85 filing cabinet drawers of records, Newman told a special projects committee of the County Council on Tuesday.

Newman told the committee that microfilming documents remains the best long-term way to preserve and archive county records. He said the county has historical documents, especially 19th century documents, which can be moved to a state archive.

Two companies addressed the committee on how to scan records. Computers Systems Inc.’s total proposal would cost $202,741, which could be done in two phases. It would handle scanning documents from a specific date forward.

The backlog of past documents could be done by a second firm, Imaging Office System Inc., that would link into software used by Computer Systems, however no cost was presented to the committee.

Councilman Jim Hellmann, chairman of the council’s special projects committee, said Wednesday he wants to see the bigger picture on the overall costs, not just for computer software and hardware, but annual and long-term maintenance contracts and projected annual budgetary costs.

“That is still information we have to get. We need to know the entire costs of going to a paperless setup: the cost of scanning, cost of microfilming, cost of destroying documents,” he said. “If scanning, does it impact the county’s data processing in terms of [computer] memory and any equipment that goes in there?” Hellmann said.

“We all know in this technology age, the thing that really eats at you are service agreements. We’ve got to be sure we have a handle on what those service agreements will be before we commit, so that when the sun sets at the end of the day, we are better off financially.”

Hellmann said other costs include microfilming.

“It was the understanding of the Council and still is that only scanning a document does not allow you to destroy or eliminate all of the paper. There is a microfilming process and we do not know the cost of microfilming” for record archiving, he said.

Hellmann said the committee will continue to work on finding total costs with the help of county departments “so we are not basing something on whether we feel a company is good or bad. We really expect the departments to come up with an answer. Give us hard numbers; that is when you make budget decisions. Getting numbers is sometimes difficult,” Hellmann said.

Howard Greninger can be reached at (812) 231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com.

        

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