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Williamsport committee backs $120,000 plan to digitize city records, seeks plan for long‑term storage costs
Summary
City staff recommended awarding a $120,000 digitization contract to DMI to scan municipal records from several departments; council members pressed staff about retention priorities, department inclusion, and recurring hosting costs after an initial one-year WebDocs subscription.
City staff recommended on June 9 that the Committee of the Whole authorize a professional services award to DMI for a $120,000 document-digitization and digital conversion project covering records stored on the first and basement floors and in community development.
"I had a total of 19 respondents," Mr. Black said, describing the bidding process and explaining that DMI proposed an all-in price to pick up, scan and return materials and to preserve historical bound volumes as books. Mr. Black said DMI would "do all the staple removing, unfolding, batching, three layers of OCR" and scan most material at 300 dpi, raising resolution to 400 dpi for older or low-contrast maps.
During questioning, Councilman Yoder pressed staff on record-retention criteria and scope and was told the city follows municipal code for retention requirements. Council members confirmed that community development and finance records were prioritized for the $120,000 budget and that streets and parks have most of their files ready to be digitized.
On storage, Mr. Black said DMI would upload materials to a WebDocs service for a one-year subscription and that the city planned to transfer files to on-site Synology arrays after quality review. Committee members raised recurring cost concerns: the transcript records an estimate that continuing the WebDocs hosting could run about $1,200 a month after the first year and possibly grow with storage needs, and members urged staff to compare cloud-hosting versus local front-end search tools and to standardize folder structure across departments.
No formal motion or vote occurred in the committee; staff said additional phases to include other departments are anticipated. The item will return for consideration at the full council meeting.
