The town of Colchester has replaced boxes of files with digital documents for more accessible land records.
Municipal governments must manage growing amounts of records, going back to their earliest days. Property histories and many other important documents are archived by town and city governments, stored in filing cabinets, basements and warehouses. As the years go on, keeping these documents safe and easily searchable becomes more challenging and expensive. More and more municipalities are taking steps to simplify the document search process while minimizing storage space.
Historical preservation
Municipal governments are working with document scanning solutions to digitize historic land records. Suzette Lohmeyer of GCN reported that digitizing documents gives users and their mortgage companies better access to important records. When an individual buys a home, a title insurance company needs to perform an exhaustive search of all past liens or deeds on that property. The title company may not be local, so allowing digital access with search functions streamlines the process. Principal users of digital land records include everyone involved in the real estate market: Realtors, lawyers and engineers, to name a few.
"Colchester's files needed to be digitized for safer storage and streamlined applications."
Colchester's land records
Town officials from Colchester, Vermont found themselves deluged by paper records. The year was 1998, and the Vermont town's land records only existed in paper form. Easements, deeds, permits and other types of records were filed away. The complex indexing system made finding information a challenge, and the possibility of a fire or flood destroying these records forever made the system a liability.
Every year added 10,000 more records that needed to be filed away, adding more to the overwhelming volume. While the Vermont State Archives had its own scanning process, it couldn't handle the number of files that Colchester needed digitized.
Colchester's files needed to be digitized for safer storage and streamlined applications. In 2003, the town government partnered with Inception Technologies to take Colchester's land records into the next millennium, establishing a long-term plan to digitize documents.
The plan started as an in-house scanning project, with Inception converting records to microfilm. However, these documents were not searchable, so the next phase was to establish a more sophisticated system. Over the past year, Colchester officials shipped 356 boxes full of land records to Inception for a more sophisticated document capture.
Inception's services and role with the Planning Board documents
In working with Sarah Hadd, Director of Planning and Zoning for Colchester, Inception has provided transportation, document preparation, scanning and indexing services for her and her Planning Board. Typically within the Planning Board's files, which are organized and named by Tax Map, Lot and Extension, there are Permits and Applications, Correspondence, Maps and Site Plans. These documents range from half-size sheets and sticky notes to maps and drawings that are 36 by 48 inches in size.
Inception scans and integrates these files so an entire folder of documents, regardless of size, are merged into a single multi-page PDF document. Inception also runs the merged documents through an Optical Character Recognition, or OCR process, and the final product is a text-searchable PDF.
Inception also provides a file with index data so the town can import the files into their document repository and link them to their online permitting system. Inception has worked with numerous towns in the conversion and preservation of their documents. In many cases the towns are looking to ensure that their paper, digital and microfilm collections are all complete and have all the same information.
To assist in this process, Inception can take their source documents and produce whatever they need. For example, they can scan paper or microfilm to a digital image or take a digital image and write it to microfilm.
"The result of this process will be fully accessible and transparent public records."
Full access and transparency
Historic land records dating back to 1987 are now available through an online portal and computer terminals at Town Hall for easier searching. Within the next year, all records dating back to 1922 will be available as well. The result of this process will be fully accessible and transparent public records for the town of Colchester, and computer terminals in place of a mountains of physical files.
By May, residents will be able to access all of these records, submit permits and view pending applications with ease. Previously they would have had to dig through boxes of old files and follow a complex indexing system. Preservation funds paid by applicants have helped to cover the cost of the digitization. Title applications will no longer have to wait for the office to open to be filed, and applicants can check for updates online. Hadd said that "the once overflowing paper that consumed the Town Offices in 1998 is being replaced with the hum of small electronic servers."
Town and city governments are finding that digitizing records makes them more accessible, helps to preserve them and saves space. By taking advantage of document digitizing solutions, they're joining other communities in a more efficient and productive digital landscape.
