County Government Slashes Retrieval Times For Digital Records

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•Case Study: Will County, IL

A county Records Management Office provides a service for all other county offices that directly serve citizens. The job of a Records Management Office is to take all paper documents that need to be preserved, from all county offices, and implement a strategy to preserve them.

For many years, the law mandated that all permanent records be preserved on microfilm. When the law changed on January 1, 2001 to allow digitally scanned copies to be legal documents (The Illinois Electronic Records Act), the challenge to find a preservation system that would be both efficient and cost effective increased dramatically.

No one knows more about this challenge than Lynn Behringer, Director of the Records Management Office in Will County, IL. Lynn spent 19 out of the last 20 years as the department's Director, with the mission of controlling costs while improving service to the other county offices and to the citizens of Will County.

When Behringer became Director in 1984, the Records Management Office was called The Microfilm Copy Department. Until 2002, the department had two basic functions. It made copies of documents for other departments (functioning as a printshop service shop), and it microfilmed documents (functioning as a filming service bureau).

Behringer's department microfilmed about two million pages per year. They microfilmed all documents (organized in files ranging in size from three to 1000 pages) that had to be retained "permanently or for a long period of time." After filming, one copy of the microfilm roll was returned to the originating department and one copy was stored for safekeeping at a separate, secured location. When any department wanted a copy of a microfilmed file or document within a file, it had to find the document on the roll of film and print it using a microfilm reader/printer.

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•Case Study: Will County, IL