Artilce Reads as follows:
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 cardboard boxes of court files and another 300 boxes of miscellaneous records stored in that facility. Early that year, the Seventh Judicial District partnered with the 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 coodinator, 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.
After an RFP was developed by the judicial branch, the contract was granted to Com Microfilm Company of Springfield, Illinois. The 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 the firm in November, 2003. The Seventh Judicial District put in almost $117,000 of unspent funds from its FY 2003 budget and added a $25,771 reimbursement from a contractor that had been hired to image the probate files in Cedar County. That contractor had breached its 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.
“We get a high quality image with amazing speed and accuracy.”
The hardware and software were installed beginning in December, 2003. We purchased two Kodak duplex high speed scanners, nine personal desktop computers, wo servers, a RAID array of high capacity hard drives, a highend flatbed scanner for photographs, and a high quality CD burner. We used a program called Docuware 4.5 to convert the images to TIFF-4 format. We used Tele-Forms software for verifying and form reading, and CMCITRAX software for indexing. The training of the staff took about six days in that month. The hardware and software have performed as specified in the contract. We get a high quality image with amazing speed and accuracy. The files are semiautomatically 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.
In about nine months, the project has scanned, indexed and verified 10,442 mental health files and 48,653 small claims files. We are now starting 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 have moved on to imaging criminal case files the second week in October. Our inventory indicates there are approximately 658 bankers’ boxes of criminal files which are not yet scanned.
This project would not have been possible without the cooperative efforts of the Scott County Board of Supervisors and the Seventh Judicial District Judges and Court Administration. The benefits will accrue to both the Courts and the County.
* Judge Kelley sits on the Seventh Judicial District Court bench in Davenport and is project manager of the district’s innovative District Court Records Imaging Project.
The court records imaging project for the Seventh Judicial District in Davenport reached a milestone September 16 this year with the completion of scanning into digital format 1,000,000 pages of closed court file records.
The 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. That is only the beginning. Many more records are being committed to Compact Disc and boxes and boxes of paper records shredded. Court house storage space and an annex warehouse holding those records will be cleared, much to the delight of county officials. Soon, access to the records will be swifter and more accurate. In order to celebrate this latest milestone, we held a modest celebration: a pizza party late in October in the imaging project office in the old county treasurer’s space in the Scott County Courthouse.
The same morning, we destroyed the imaged mental health files in the northeast corner of the east courthouse parking lot in the shredding truck of Secure Document Destruction Co. It took only about 45 minutes to shred the 10,442 Mental Health files that had been imaged and electronically stored.
“The court had 1,566 bankers cardboard boxes of court files....”