County to acquire new records system
The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously Wednesday to approve Lincoln County Clerk and Recorder Robin Benson’s proposal to acquire the LaserFiche Avante software system for the county. The system, said Benson, will enable electronic storage and retrieval of county records and enhance the ability of the public to access those records.
“It is my desire as clerk and recorder to improve records management for the county,” Benson told the commissioners. “I believe that, as clerk and recorder, it’s my number one priority.”
The project bid provided by the vendor, MCCI, details hardware and software licensing costs totaling $12,133. Benson said she also expects to spend up to an additional $10,000 to have MCCI personnel on-site for one week to begin the process of scanning old county records into the new system.
The new system will feature optical character recognition, or O.C.R. technology. O.C.R. enables users to search scan documents by text characters, instead of just capturing the documents as a single image. A user will be able to search for any documents containing specific words or phrases, Benson said.
The commissioners also approved a plan by Benson to have an additional private contractor, hired by the county, come in and train while the MCCI staff are on-site. That contractor will complete the scanning and input of the records after the vendor staff complete their work.
Commissioner Mark Peck said it was better to hire a contractor and get everything done at one time, instead of trying to juggle the scanning of documents with the normal workload of the clerk and recorder’s office staff.
“It’d be like hooking a transmission to a car motor while it’s running, without a clutch,” Peck said. “We should just invest in doing it right and getting as much scanned in up front as possible.”
In addition to the upfront cost, the software comes with an annual maintenance fee of $3,495. The money, Benson said, will come from the document preservation fund maintained by the county. A portion of all fees received by the clerk and recorder’s office goes into the fund, which has a balance of approximately $85,000. Benson said the fund grows by between $15,000 and $20,000 per year, so the ongoing maintenance cost of the new system will be substantially lower than the available money in the document fund.
Benson’s proposal is to begin the transition with documents in the clerk and recorder’s office, including general correspondence from the commissioners and other elected officials. Minutes from commissioner meetings would follow, along with documents from all grants managed by the county. She planned to place the order immediately and anticipates the new system will be installed and the first round of data uploads to begin by Nov. 18.
“This is a big step in the right direction,” said Board of Commissioners Chairman Mike Cole.