Document Management Document Imaging Document System - Laserfiche Global Municipal Exchange March 2007

"My vision is: all documents all the time—online. I tell citizens, ‘You can be home in your pajamas at 3 o’clock in the morning reading the city code if you want to.’"

—Mary Feldman
City Recorder

“Technology changes everyday. We want to keep up with it and be sustainable enough to keep getting rid of paper and put the power of the research tool in the hands of the users. In the larger view, you have a better informed citizenry.”

—Mary Walston
Council, Public and Governmental Affairs Manager

For City Recorder Mary Feldman, using Laserfiche® finally got everyone on the same page—literally. It wasn’t so easy with the very vocal, Web-savvy population of “The World’s Greatest City of the Arts and Outdoors.” Feldman’s job entails updating the city code for Eugene, Oregon, and making it available to citizens over the Web. Back when she was posting the code using HTML, it was a very time-consuming process. And updates created other problems.

“It was a nightmare. Our land use chapter alone is 555 pages,” says Feldman. “We have a subscription service for citizens to get paper copies of the code, which we update five or six times a year. There was no correlation between what was on the Web and the page numbers people saw in their books. One of the big attractions of Laserfiche for me was that everyone could literally be on the same page.”

Now that Feldman uses Laserfiche to update and post the code, she saves about 20 hours of work for each major code revision. And citizens and staff have a common frame of reference—the page numbers are the same in the books and on the Web. Of course, with Laserfiche, residents can search using key words to find what they’re looking for as well.

“As a research tool, Laserfiche is wonderful,” says Council, Public and Governmental Affairs Manager Mary Walston. “Being able to search by key word is a terrific feature.”

Walston was part of the original team that looked at electronic solutions to help the city cut down on paper use and better manage its documents. The other products the team looked at fade in Walston’s memory because she was so impressed with Laserfiche. After a brief demo from her local reseller, V.P. Consulting, Walston was sold. “I was quite impressed with the ability to search as well as how quickly you could store documents,” she says.

There were two driving forces behind the city’s search for electronic document management. The first was the desire to cut down on the paper used to prepare city council agenda packets, running from 200-400 pages each week. The second was to make documents available to citizens over the Web.

Walston notes, “I couldn’t see the value of having Laserfiche only internally for the code, the council materials, the charter. We have people coming in or calling all the time asking for copies. We’d have to run and make a copy, send it, and charge them for it.”

Since converting to Laserfiche in 2004, the city has made documents dating back to the mid to late 1990s available over the Web. Walston, however, has ambitions to make older documents available. “My vision is: all documents all the time—online. I tell citizens, ‘You can be home in your pajamas at 3 o’clock in the morning reading the city code if you want to.’”

But pleasing Eugene citizens, in their pajamas or not, is frequently a formidable task. “We have a very involved citizenry,” says Walston. Frequent users of the city’s Web site, Eugene residents had become accustomed to its look and feel. When they gained access to city documents through the WebLink™ component of Laserfiche, they were met with a different interface. When WebLink didn’t look like the rest of the Web site, “People got confused,” says Walston.

That’s where Rachel Peña, application systems analyst for the city of Eugene, comes in. “Our citizens are really involved,” says Peña with a laugh. “When they don’t like something, we hear about it.”

Taking advantage of Laserfiche’s flexibility, Peña has taken on the task of customizing WebLink to give the interface the look and feel of the Eugene Web site. “First we took public folders out of any subfolders and put them into the main folder so the public could find them more easily. Then we created a home page where you find administrative orders, for example. People click on them the same way they do on the main Web site.”

Peña cites the city council packets, including agendas and supporting documents, as a major motivator for getting Laserfiche, with WebLink the key to public access. “City workers would be printing I-don’t-know-how-many copies of 200- and 300-page documents for the public. The first thought was, ‘Why don’t we get this on the Web so we don’t have to print all this out?’”

City staff also uses the tool for research, locating records that are not yet accessible over the Web. “The staff loves it,” says Peña. “Our city recorder got a request for a historical document and was able to bring up city council minutes from the 1800s.”

She’s still refining the advanced search, but she made valuable changes to the interface right away. “I was able to publish the search results for content matches right under the document. That really helped cut down on confusion from the public. We have three Web pages up now. One for city documents—administrative orders, city council agendas and the like. Another is just for city code, with links to each chapter and section, so when residents click the link they are automatically taken to the right section. The third page is just for the land use section of the city code. It’s so huge it made sense to separate it. ”

Peña looks forward to refining the search syntax as well as more integrations in the future as other departments implement Laserfiche. “With planning and municipal courts coming on, we’ll be getting the Integrator’s Toolkit™ so we can further integrate it with other software.”

Council Manager Walston recognizes that document management is always evolving and that the city’s system is a work in progress. “I always tell people, the Wright brothers didn’t fly the SST. Technology changes every day. We want to keep up with it and be sustainable enough to keep getting rid of paper and put the power of the research tool in the hands of the users. In the larger view, you have a better-informed citizenry.”

There’s a lot of progress to point to so far. Feldman notes that Laserfiche has simplified assembling city council agendas. “Information would come in all different formats. Some people would email a Word or PDF file; some people would send paper. It was a challenge to assemble all that into paper packets. With Laserfiche, everything is available electronically.”

Of course, some people can’t be weaned off paper and want the physical packets. But there’s no more gathering files in different formats. “Now,” says Feldman, “we can just print out all the materials directly from Laserfiche and it’s done.”

Walston adds, however, that many people do access the packets online. “We’ve cut our printing budget in half. Laserfiche saves us a lot of paper. We’re going to have a computer installed in the council chambers with access to Laserfiche. So when someone wants to question an item, they can go over and read it online.”

City staff has gotten a lot of positive feedback about online access to documents. Feldman recalls the comments of a title-company employee who relies on WebLink to access land use and zoning information. “She thanked us for making her job easier, and called us ‘miles ahead of most agencies,’” says Feldman. “She said the product was ‘one of best tools I’ve used—and I work with cities all around the United States.’”

The staff takes citizen requests quite seriously. Walston says, “We had a meeting with some representatives from neighborhood groups, our IT people and our office to identify some of their issues with the Web portal. We’re trying to be very respectful of the community and actively work on their issues. Hopefully, Rachel will be able to do further customization.”

Walston sees a positive side to some complaints. “A lot of people were getting ‘access denied’ messages. That meant people were using the system, which is a good thing.” The city increased availability by purchasing more user licenses.

She especially appreciates the time she saves using Laserfiche. “Before, when people wanted copies of the minutes on a certain topic, I’d have to try to remember when the meeting was (was that in 1997 or 1998?), which month, and then sort through and read each document. Now I can just put in a key word and find them right away.”

Walston wants to give the public the ability to research more documents. “It’s great to be able to trace the history of different issues—some have been going on for ten years or more. I want to make all our old minutes available through WebLink.”

All in due time. Eugene may not be flying the SST just yet, but they are a long way from Kitty Hawk.