Conundrum

It's 4:30 p.m. Do you know where your files are?

The police chief of an East Coast municipality had been the lead detective in a murder case that was still unresolved 10 years after the fact.

There had been a prime suspect right from the start. In the chief’s view, the evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that person. But a neighbor of the suspect came forward to provide him with an alibi for the time of the slaying. The district attorney’s office had decided not to prosecute on that basis.

When a local writer asked to see the file on the case about two years ago, the chief was happy to cooperate. He sincerely hoped that media attention might finally correct what he believed had been an unforgivable miscarriage of justice.

Initially, the chief was certain the file was in the storage trailer out back. When it did not turn up after several searches there, he sent an email query to the entire police department. No one responded. He then thought it might have been sent back to the district attorney's office. Nothing came from that inquiry either.

From time to time over the past two years, the chief has initiated several searches for the file but to no avail. He has retold the story of the case painstakingly, but the writer has found it difficult to move forward credibly without the actual case file.

This story is an extreme example of the potential consequences of misplacing a file. In fact, it's possible in this instance that someone in the chain of custody made sure that the case file would get lost.

The incident starkly illustrates the importance of having secure, reliable ways of handling sensitive documents, however.

Conventional Solution

Whether the file is a lurid police report or the minutes of a municipal council meeting, the first record keeping objectives should always be the same: Establish a secure and easily retrievable location for it, and a foolproof way to track its movements.

"Until the mid-1990s, we relied on the amazing thoroughness of a member of the Clerk's Office staff," says Diane Rosecrans, the City Clerk and Finance Director of Winfield, KS, a progressive city of 12,000 situated in southeastern Kansas near its border with Oklahoma. "She maintained two complete and distinct filing systems plus a third layer of redundancy for keeping multiple copies in different parts of the file and for distributing copies outside the department. In our primary file, the originals of similar types of files were kept together. Organized by date, there were separate sections for minutes, ordinances, resolutions, board and commission appointments, agreements and bond issues.

"If there was a resolution that related to an ordinance, for example, she'd put a copy of the resolution with the ordinance and vice versa.

"She also maintained a central file that mixed copies of every document together alphabetically. There might be one copy of a file in its own folder and another copy of it in another folder as support documentation for a different matter.

"She watched the file room very closely. No one was allowed in there unless she knew what they were up to. If you needed a file, she'd practically make you sign for it in blood. Then she would make a note of what had happened in the upper right hand corner of the original.

"It seemed like overkill but it worked. If you needed any file, no matter how obscure, it would materialize like magic. It might take hours, but it would turn up. We killed a lot of trees making all those copies but the system worked very well, especially for casual users who had little or no familiarity with our work.

"By the time this woman retired in 1995, we could no longer afford to have one person focused totally on maintaining the files, especially after we had one staff position cut from our budget. We began to condense everything into one file. It wasn't always as easy to find what we needed but the reduction in time devoted to filing was worth the risk that something might get lost."

21st Century Solution

With Ms. Rosecrans as a driving force, Winfield converted from paper-based filing to a Laserfiche document imaging system in 1998. The dynamics of maintaining and protecting documents have changed almost completely as a result.

"Our biggest reason for looking into document imaging was for the search capabilities," she explains. "When we got it, we went on a vigorous campaign to scan in all of the City Council minutes going back to our incorporation in 1873 and the ordinances, resolutions and the rest going back to the sixties.

"We established a simple template that indexed each document by type, decade and date. We used OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to supplement the templates. We are now able to find what we need with key word searches in seconds.

"We not only save the time of the person on my staff, we also save time for the person who wants the document and often for a third person somewhere else.

"Another truly excellent feature of document imaging versus paper is the ease-of-mind of being able to move files off site as a disaster recovery precaution. Our paper-based filing system was a marvel but it was all here in the building. Now we move documents to CD periodically and ship them out to secure storage. That is a huge relief.

"We know that no one realistically can erase an image once it's in the system so we do not worry about losing files. We also consider everything we have as a public record and therefore are not especially concerned about who might be using them.

"If we needed to know who was using our documents, however, as would be the case in a law enforcement agency, we could do so easily by adding an audit trail module or workflow to our system. Those measures would track and protect critical and confidential files automatically, and far more securely than we could ever hope to with a paper-based filing system."

Ms. Rosecrans plans eventually to make all of Winfield's public records available on the city's website using Laserfiche WebLink, a secure gateway for publishing documents directly to the Internet without HTML coding.

This newsletter is an open space for you to share your experiences and knowledge. If you have a story about preventing loss of files, or on another subject of concern to municipal officials, let us know. Similarly, if you'd like to suggest a document related conundrum for a future issue, please drop us an e-mail at usernews@Laserfiche.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

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