Starting with fewer than 1,000 pages earlier this year, the Web site of the Collier County Clerk of Courts recently surpassed 80,000 pages in size, making it one of the largest full-text-searchable repositories of local government public records anywhere.

Eventually, Collier County Clerk of Courts Dwight E. Brock plans to use the Internet to make virtually every record under his control available to the public.

As a former prosecutor, I believe that government functions best when it operates in the public eye,” Brock explains. “At the same time, as a CPA, I want to keep costs down. Thanks to technological advances that allow us to put up enormous amounts of information quickly and inexpensively, we can now do both.”

Currently, Brock’s site provides access to reports on the actions of the Collier County Board of County Commissioners since 1991. The next major step is to add public records from the court itself. “Eventually, people will have access to everything short of the trial strategies for the criminal and civil cases that we are handling at that time,” Brock says.

The repository of records on Brock’s site is powered by Laserfiche WebLink®, a scan-to-the-Web publishing system capable of providing searchable access to millions of pages of documents. Using this product, Board of County Commissioners information becomes available as soon as it is scanned into an Internet-connected database. The process eliminates the need for coding, file conversion, special plug-ins or software in order to view the document. For example, it would take several years for an experienced Webmaster to put 80,000 pages of information on the Internet using HTML coding, the current standard for the vast majority of Internet pages. Brock’s staff was able to create the initial database for its Web site in less than ten hours.

“Using this approach, we can provide instantaneous access to huge amounts of information very inexpensively, especially now that the initial ’supersizing’ of the Web site is finished,” says Brock. “In terms of human resources saved, the system has already paid for itself.”

The office of the Collier County Clerk of Courts is one of the first local government agencies anywhere to commit to putting all its public records on the Internet. Others making similar commitments include the City of Bakersfield, CA; Deschutes and Benton counties in Oregon; and a regional planning council in Brazil. There are more than 30 additional local government agencies in various stages of using Laserfiche WebLink to turn the Internet into a searchable library for their public records. Lakeland, FL-based R&S Integrated Products and Services, Inc., handled the Collier County installation. The repository can be found at http://www.clerk.collier.fl.us/weblink/.

Tags: courts, Local Government, WebLink

Posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2001 at 11:36 am under County Government, Courts, Customer Stories, Justice Systems, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.