Saint John, New Brunswick, is the city “where life is on your terms.” Unless, of course, you’re in charge of the city’s records. Thanks to the Public Records Act and the Archives Act, records managers in the Canadian provinces don’t have a lot of leeway when it comes to record-keeping procedures and retention schedules. For Saint John, it was becoming quite a challenge to keep records while keeping paper under control.

Common Clerk Pat Woods kicked off the search for a system to help him meet the legal obligations of his office, which include preparing council agendas, maintaining and protecting documents and making them available to the public. He was looking for an integrated, scalable software tool that would automate document management in the clerk’s office but still be easy to operate and manage.

Business Integration Specialist Cindy Blizzard was project manager for the search, which began in 2004 with a needs assessment. She wanted to make sure that the product the city chose met the needs of the whole organization, not just the clerk’s office. Blizzard formed a committee of eight, from various departments, to develop a Request For Proposals and evaluate the seven responses. “We first ranked the responses based on the quality of the submission, the capacity to meet city requirements and the qualifications and experience of the companies,” says Blizzard.

The search committee then narrowed the field of contenders to three and, after viewing product demos from the companies, unanimously agreed on Laserfiche®. Says Blizzard, “We liked Laserfiche for its ease of use, its search capabilities and the flexibility of the system, particularly its ability to handle all types of documents.”

Elizabeth Gormley, Assistant Common Clerk, served on the committee. “One of our criteria was experience with municipal government projects, and Laserfiche certainly fit the bill there.” Other pluses were the Agenda Manager™ component, easy accessibility of documents over the Web and local support from the city’s reseller.

In April of 2005, Saint John began implementing Laserfiche and by July it had imported most of its electronic documents. Installing Laserfiche Records Management Edition turned out to be a tremendous advantage for Corporate Records Manager David Burke, who began using it in 2006. “Here in New Brunswick,” notes Burke, “the Provincial Archivist mandates that municipalities manage their records across their lifecycles according to specific schedules. The schedules are mated to a hierarchical, subject-based hierarchy known as the Municipal Records Authority for New Brunswick (MRA).” With over 900 different records series linking to 72 unique retention schedules, the requirements can be complex.

“I just knew there had to be some way to automate the process of getting information from the MRA into Laserfiche,” Burke recalls. Initially, Burke found a colleague in Alberta to share code from a custom program to link a spreadsheet with a Microsoft® Access database. Burke then worked with the city’s ISS department to set up a folder structure.

“About that time I found out that Laserfiche was developing a utility called the Record Series Setup,” says Burke. “With the help of our reseller, I integrated the MRA and RME and it works and looks good! It sets up the whole system—pulls all the information we need from the spreadsheet we designed, creates the folder structure and then points to the appropriate retention schedules. That would have been I-don’t-know-how-many millions of key strokes and clicks to do manually. That tool was invaluable.”

Assistant Common Clerk Gormley echoes Burke’s enthusiasm for Laserfiche. Agenda Manager has saved her immeasurable time in preparing city council agenda packets. She’s seen the stress of the job shrink right along with the volume of paper it takes to organize and distribute agendas and supporting documents for the biweekly meetings.

Gormley remembers, “We used to prepare 34 kits per meeting—enough for the press, all the city commissioners, some of the staff and the 11 council members. And they were never less than two inches thick.” Now the number is 16 and falling. The press and most of the commissioners access the agenda kits online and now the council members are beginning to use their laptops to access them online as well.

“In terms of time saved,” says Gormley, “the photocopying aspect alone was about eight hours per meeting. And inevitably, when you’re dealing with that many documents, and each packet contained hundreds, you generate a lot of heat and the machine would break down. Then you’re pushing the clock and adding more stress. But with Laserfiche, it’s just a click of a button and your document is submitted. You can review it right at your desk and it’s already stored in Laserfiche so you eliminate a process there. Now, instead of calling us, both the public and our own staff find what they need online.”

The Laserfiche search function is an added bonus. Gormley recalls the exhaustive process of trying to find an item for a municipal councillor, staff member or citizen in the days before Laserfiche. “It’s not only the agendas we’d be searching, but supporting documents. In the old days we’d manually search the agendas to find out if an item was on council. Then we’d physically have to go into a room, search through a box and dig out the file, find the report, make a copy, replace the report and give the copy to whomever was looking for it. Now we just say ‘Click on this,’ and there’s a report. We save the walking and the looking—it’s just an incredible advantage.”

The sharp decrease in calls to the clerk’s office has impressed Blizzard, too. “Staff used to report spending significant time searching for information on the computers in their shared drives or paper copies in the storage rooms. Now city staff and the public can easily find information with Laserfiche WebLink™ without having to contact the Clerk’s staff.”

Burke applauds Laserfiche search capabilities, too. “I’ve digitized the past council minutes from 1785 to the present. After 1934 they’re all typewritten and searchable through optical character recognition. Citizens can view and search them on the Web and they really see the benefit because council meetings are where all the decisions get made.”

Burke is particularly proud of a research project he did for the Commissioner of Building and Inspection Services on the property rezoning. “It took me three days to generate a 100-page history of a particular set of conditions in the city over the past five years—and at that point I was new to the system. The commissioner was able to present the findings to council and they were able to make an informed decision. Forget how long it would have taken to do manually—I don’t even know if it would have been feasible with paper.”

The integration of MRA and RME is just the beginning for Saint John. Blizzard is enthusiastic about future integrations. She envisions integrating Laserfiche with the city’s GIS application as well as the city’s management software, SunGard® HTE. In fact, after reading about the successful integration of Laserfiche and HTE in the Laserfiche Global Municipal Exchange, staff in Saint John contacted city staff in Bryan, Texas to learn how they did it.

Saint John’s integration of Laserfiche with MRA breaks new ground for New Brunswick. Says Burke, “We’re the first municipality in the province and probably in Atlantic Canada to apply retention schedules to our electronic records. That’s huge. We’re sharing our work with other municipalities, letting them know about that whole integration of the MRA and RME, including the city of Moncton, another Laserfiche user. We’re looking forward to working together with other municipalities, so we can have a uniform, efficient records management system.”

Tags: records management

Posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 3:09 pm under Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, State & Local Government. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.