Dealing with Rising Floods of Water - and Paper
October 12th, 2005 Comment on this articleLast year, a rising tide of paper records convinced Benton County that it was time to update its filing system. There were 22 shelves on the second floor of the Benton-Corvallis Law Enforcement Building, 115 boxes of older records in the basement, and 30 boxes stored at an off-site warehouse two miles away. Incident reports for everything from barking dogs to murders filled shelves, drawers, and boxes. There was even a county jail ledger from 1858.
“We knew we would eventually need an imaging system, so we started looking early,” recalls Michael Dane, Director of Support Services in the Sheriff’s Department. “We receive 6500 reports each year, averaging 6 pages each. Right now the records clerk spends lots of time filing, retrieving reports, searching for lost files, and making photocopies.”
The Department opted for Laserfiche®-a document imaging software package designed by Compulink Management Center of Long Beach, California-and a high speed Ricoh scanner, all purchased from VP Consulting, Inc., of Eugene, Oregon. Almost immediately after the purchase order was approved, Mother Nature proved it was none too early: the worst rains in decades sent the Willamette River surging over its banks. Raw sewage threatened to back up into the County’s basement records room and the lowest two shelves were in danger of being inundated.
Eight volunteer deputies worked frantically to box up records and carry them upstairs. “Our offices were filled with boxes of paper,” Dane said. “It was hampering our work.”
Later, as the waters receded, the County donated the old jail records to a local museum and changed its rules on retention of all records. “We used to keep everything forever,” said Dane. “Now we follow the state requirements-2 years for misdemeanors, 7 years for felonies, and ‘forever’ only for homicides and unattended deaths.” (According to Dane, Oregon law defines “forever” as 100 years.) They also decided to broaden their implementation of Laserfiche to include current documents and active cases. Said Dane, “Initially, it was just to be for archiving, a replacement for filing cabinets. But as we saw the system demonstrated, we realized how much more we could do and our expectations changed. Imaging is not just a way to archive stuff, it’s also a way to share it!”
Dane reviewed two other systems before settling on Laserfiche. “The first was slick, but it cost $19,000 for each workstation, without any networking, and the proprietary hardware would just be a big paperweight when we weren’t using it. The Laserfiche system uses standard PC’s and our existing Novell network.” The second system was from the vendor of the County’s video booking system. “It was very clunky,” said Dane. “The interface just wasn’t intuitive.”
Finally Dane visited Oregon State University, which had picked Laserfiche in 1993 after a three-year search. “The librarian, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, told me that anybody can sell an imaging system, but Compulink was tops for a solid, stable network imaging system. Rather than conduct our own three-year search, we took his advice and bought Laserfiche.”
After scanning in the current records, the County plans to scan in all incident reports from 1994 and 1995, and then make the system available to the District Attorney, Juvenile Authority, and Roads Department via the County’s WAN (Wide-Area Network). Eventually all 15 County Departments will archive and share their records using Laserfiche. Continued Dane: “We’re even considering making the scanned documents available to the City of Corvallis because they share our network. With Laserfiche, we’ll be sharing files using faxing and our network instead of using photocopying and inter-office mail.”