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Officials weigh digitizing county records, preservation fund and grants to cover scanning costs
Summary
County clerks and staff discussed digitizing court and probate records, quoted vendor scanning/import estimates and suggested using preservation funds, grants or sales-tax care-and-keeping funds to help pay for mass imports.
County staff described the county’s backlog of undigitized records, vendor pricing for mass import and potential funding sources including the preservation fund and state/local grant programs.
Officials said some record categories are deteriorating and that a prior import (2017) scanned approximately 1,000 probate files at a cost they recalled as about $20,000. More recently, staff cited a vendor per-book price of about $365 for commonly requested books and itemized per-page costs discussed in the meeting: about $0.28 to scan a page, $0.07 to index and $0.08 per page for storage. County staff identified Midwest (Midwest Printing) as a vendor that previously performed imports and worked with the county’s vendor Telco.
Staff said the county’s preservation fund grows slowly (one clerk said the fund had about $22,000 saved and is expected to stop accruing in 2027 unless extended). Commissioners discussed whether the preservation fund or sales-tax care-and-keeping revenue could subsidize a mass digitization project; staff cautioned that statute limits the types of filings that generate the preservation fee and that legislative or statutory constraints determine fund uses.
Officials discussed tradeoffs between hiring staff to scan records (which could take multiple years and add salary and benefits) and contracting a vendor for a one-time import plus cloud storage. Staff asked for help identifying grant opportunities and offered to coordinate with county grant-search resources.
Ending: Commissioners asked staff to investigate funding options, provide a cost estimate to digitize specific record categories and explore grants; no procurement or contract was approved at the meeting.
