One day about six months ago, a clerk carried a large box of construction permit records into the Central Storage basement of the Eaton County Courthouse. She looked at all the shelves, filled with boxes just like hers. She looked and looked.

There wasn’t room for one more box of records. About 21 years after the Eaton County Courthouse was built, it had run out of storage space.

The county’s Manager of Information Services, Robert Sobie, decided it was time for the record-keeping revolution he’d been planning. “I have been extremely fond of imaging technology for a number of years.” he said.

Laserfiche Document Imaging, that is.

“Our paper records are the lifeline of what we do,” Sobie said recently. “You cannot process a court case unless you have a case file. You can’t construct a building unless you have a building permit. We need all that information; we just have to store it differently today than we’ve been doing over the past 100 years.”

He consulted Jennifer Tysse, of Matrix Imaging, in nearby Southfield, and together they worked out a system that included a 10-user version of Laserfiche operating on the county’s Novell network.

After the system was installed, it was time to run the old paper files through a scanner, converting their data from words, numbers and drawings on paper to the electronic language of computers. That now is being done in-house by a temporary employee, who “knew very little about computers and nothing about document imaging,” Sobie said.

“But it took us only a day to teach her what to do,” Sobie said. “That’s how user-friendly Laserfiche is.”

The first records being scanned into the system are those of the Construction Codes Department–applications and building permits. In mid-November, the data was being scanned into computer hard drives, but equipment was already on order to switch over to a high-capacity magneto-optical system–compact disks which, unlike the ordinary CD-ROM, can be written over many times.

Next to be scanned in are the county court records, and sheriff’s department records–all the data and photographs of people charged with crimes.

Ultimately, said Sobie, they plan to extend the system to the Registrar of Deeds office. “We’ve been supplying the title companies with microfilm copies of deeds and mortgages after they’re filed,” he said. “We won’t do that any more: we’ll supply them with a week or a month of land-record images on a compact disk that will have Laserfiche software on it as well as the images. The title companies are very excited about that–but what they’re going to like even better–and we’re going to give it to them–is dial-in access to the county network. They’re going to be able to sit in their offices and see those images on our system as quickly as we scan them in.

“I tell you, we’re on the cusp of a records revolution.”

Tags: courts, microfilm, State and Local Government

Posted on Monday, February 24th, 2003 at 12:12 pm under County Government, Customer Stories, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.