Scott County Iowa Shreds Their First Documents!
Scott County Iowa Scanned their Millionth image in Early October. Photos below are from Scott County Scanning area where they celebreated by having a shred party. The press release is below.
Press Release:
From: Hon. James E. Kelley
Imaging Project Manager
Seventh Judicial District Court Records Imaging Project
The court records imaging project for the Seventh Judicial District attained a milestone on September 16, 2004, with the completion of scanning into digital format one million pages of closed court file records. These records consisted of approximately 59,000 court files, and included confidential Mental Health court files from 1934 through 2003, and public document Small Claims files from 1980 to 1994.
In order to celebrate this milestone, on behalf of the project, I invite you attend a celebratory lunch/pizza party at noon on October 20, 2004, in the imaging project office, the old County Treasurers office on the second floor of the Scott County Courthouse. We will be providing pizza, soft drinks and cake or cookies to our guests and the staff of the project.
On the same morning, at 11:00 a.m., we plan on shredding the imaged Mental Health files in the shredding truck of Secure Document Construction, Co. That shredding will take place in the northeast corner of the east courthouse parking lot. We estimate that it will take only about 45 minutes to shred the 10,442 Mental Health files that have been imaged and stored electronically.
PROJECT BACKGROUND In 2003, the Scott County Board of Supervisors approached our chief judge regarding the space being utilized at the County’s Tremont Avenue facility for the storage of court records. The court had 1,566 bankers boxes of court files and another 300 boxes of miscellaneous records stored in that facility.
In early 2003, the Seventh Judicial District partnered with the Scott County Board of Supervisors to develop an imaging project to convert closed files into electronic images. The county agreed to hire two full-time temporary employees, and later expanded that to four full—time temporary employees. The Seventh Judicial District provided one clerk of court staff as a work coordinator, one full—time equivalent court attendant, a half-time office clerk from the juvenile court staff, and local management for the program. The imaging project was set up in a large space on the second floor of the Scott County Courthouse where the county treasurer had previously been located.
After a RFP was developed by the judicial branch, the contract was granted to Corn Microfilm of Springfield, Illinois. That firm had solid credentials of working with governmental bodies in Illinois. Their bid was not out of proportion to the project, as were the other bids. The final contract was signed by the State Court Administrator and Corn Microfilm Co. on November 17, 2003.
The Seventh Judicial District put in almost $117,000 of unspent funds in our FY 2003 budget, and also added a $25,771 reimbursement from a contractor which had been hired to image the probate files in Cedar County. That contractor had breached the contract when their product did not perform up to specifications and they could not fix the problems. We also obtained a grant from the Riverboat Development Authority in Scott County for $22,500 to apply toward equipment purchases. The total budget for the project was slightly over $165,000.
The hardware and software were installed commencing December 9, 2003. We purchased two Kodak duplex high speed scanners, nine personal desktop computers, two servers, a RAID array of high capacity hard drives, a high-end flatbed scanner for photographs, and a high quality CD burner. The software being used to place the images into TIFF-4 format was Docuware 4.5. We used Tele-Forms software for verifying and form reading, and CMCITRAX software for indexing. The training of the staff took approximately six days in December.
The hardware and software have performed as specified in the contract. They give us a high quality image with amazing speed and accuracy. The files are semi-automatically indexed according to the Clerk’s Dockets. The imaged files are held in the RAID array and are all backed up on read-only CD’s.
Between December 10, 2003, and August 17, 2004, the project has scanned, indexed and verified 10,442 mental health files and 48,653 small claims files. We are now commencing the process of destroying by shredding the confidential mental health files, and will be destroying, by burying in a land fill, the small claims files.
We plan on moving on to imaging criminal case files starting approximately the second week in October, 2004. Our inventory indicates there are approximately 658 bankers’ boxes of criminal files which are not yet scanned.