Anyone who’s spent time in investigative journalism—or who’s been involved in a boundary dispute with a neighbor—can tell you there’s nothing free about most freedom of information requests. These requests are often costly and time-consuming, both for the citizens who ask for information and the municipal clerks who have to locate the relevant documents. But in communities across the country, Laserfiche is helping clerks quickly respond to these requests—and citizens have definitely noticed the improved service.

Southold, NY

Town clerk Elizabeth Neville has the best of both worlds: every department in town stores its documents in Laserfiche, and four public access terminals in the town hall enable citizens to perform their own searches, without having to rely on town staff. “We’ve seen a significant increase in the number of people who are accessing records, now that they’ve seen how easy it is,” Neville says. “Laserfiche has been a godsend for dealing with freedom of information requests.”

Before the town installed Laserfiche, responding to a request often involved a trip to the records room, where staff had to find the appropriate storage box, locate and photocopy the requested documents, and then mail the photocopies to citizens. Now, as residents become more computer-savvy, they don’t hesitate to use the public access terminals or to request documents via e-mail.

Southold installed Laserfiche in 2001, after Neville heard CEO Nien-Ling Wacker speak at a technology conference. Neville immediately recognized that Laserfiche would be particularly useful in the town’s building department. Southold has enjoyed a construction boom in recent years, and landowners and developers are constantly requesting tax assessments, surveys and neighbors’ building plans in the process of seeking approvals for their own projects.

“We had a real problem in the building department, and we had more than one angry developer call to ask where his documents were,” Neville recalls. “Now, the architects and contractors can sit down with our building inspectors without having to worry about missing documents, because everything’s available in Laserfiche.”

Nantucket, MA

Five years ago, Town Clerk Catherine Flanagan Stover faced a formidable challenge: repairing, rebinding and archiving the Town & County of Nantucket’s 300 volumes of records and meeting minutes. To meet this challenge, Flanagan asked her Community Preservation Committee to purchase a Laserfiche system. “I told them it would fit in well with our plan of making records more readily accessible to the people requesting them,” she says.

Nantucket is home to many historic structures and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1966. For this reason, it’s not surprising that the clerk’s office receives so many requests. “We have people looking into historic district commission rulings, planning board decisions and litigation regarding town business,” Stover says. “We also receive numerous requests for meeting minutes.”

When staff receive a request, they typically perform a keyword search across the Laserfiche repository. Because Laserfiche displays lines of context alongside the search results, staff can quickly identify the most relevant documents, which they can then e-mail to the requestor from within Laserfiche.

Stover notes that the public’s response to these fast turn-around times has been overwhelmingly positive. “I’ve heard ‘Boy, that was fast!’ more than once,” she says. “Laserfiche has definitely exceeded our expectations.”

Prince William County, VA

Prince William County doesn’t have Laserfiche yet, but staff are looking forward to eventually implementing a system to manage the sharp increase in public records requests in the past year—the majority of which relate to undocumented immigrants, says Phil Campbell, assistant to the county executive and clerk to the board of county supervisors. When the board passed a resolution attempting to curb public services for undocumented immigrants, a local organization that backed the measure started flooding Campbell’s office with requests pertaining to school district enrollments, arrest records, county entitlement programs and property tax records.

Groups just as dedicated to fighting the legislation placed similar requests, and Campbell’s office has been swamped ever since. Campbell knows that Laserfiche could really help him deal with the flood of requests. He’s a member of both the International Institute of Municipal Clerks and the Virginia Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, and he’s seen Laserfiche in action at both organizations’ conferences.

“Implementing a Laserfiche system would really free my staff to focus on more productive activities,” he says. “Instead, we always have at least one staff member looking for records somewhere.”

Posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 7:00 am under UserNews. You can comment on this post.