Wichita County Commissioners Court on Sept. 2 approved a $99,480 quote from a cooperative vendor to convert district clerk microfiche to digital images. The motion, made by Commissioner Beecham and seconded by Commissioner Mahler, passed 5-0 after the court amended the payment source to Fund 237 (records management fund).
District Clerk Leslie Manning told the court the county stores older microfiche in a filing cabinet that is vulnerable to degradation and that digitization is needed to preserve court records. The approved quote covers approximately 1,900,000 images, the clerk said; earlier, the clerk had reported one vendor estimated 6,000,000 images, a discrepancy she attributed to differing vendor counts.
The vendor is listed on the quote as Allied States Cooperative (ESC Region 19). Manning said the vendor will deliver digitized files on drives or upload them; the vendor can upload directly into Odyssey for an additional cost, but Manning prefers county staff to attach images to cases to control quality and ordering.
Court discussion covered funding and scope. County staff said the district clerk’s records management account had approximately $261,000 prior to the purchase; approval from the court was required because statute requires the clerk to present the planned use of the fund to court. Commissioners amended the motion to charge Fund 237 (district clerk records management) rather than department 430 in the general fund; the court approved the amended motion 5-0.
Manning said conversion would take a couple of months; she noted it will produce both removable media (drives) and server copies and that uploading all images into Odyssey could be a multi-year, labor-intensive project possibly done incrementally as records are requested.
No additional countywide records-management vendor selection was adopted; commissioners noted departments may use different vendors because each department controls its own dedicated records-management receipts and statutory restrictions affect fund use.