September 24, 2018
By: Dwayne Page
County Clerk James L. (Jimmy) Poss is on a mission to save paper records in his office by digitizing them.
Right now more than 100 years of vital records, including marriage licenses, county commission minutes and more are all in their original paper forms, bound in books
With the technology so readily available, Poss said it only makes sense to preserve these records in a digital format and to scan new ones into the system going forward. It would also make the records easier for the public to access either in the county clerk’s office or on-line
Poss has already mentioned the concept to the county commission and plans to make a formal request within the next couple of months.
“I truly want to protect these records for our county. This would serve as an alternate form of protection from fire, water, age & physical damage etc. This will also provide easier access and more options for citizens when in need for such documents as searching county commission records, resolutions and marriage records. A number of our more recent marriages are currently available online at tncountyclerk.com. However, many older records are not searchable at this time,” said Poss
“In order to complete this process it would involve many hours of in house scanning and for certain older books it would require additional funding for the appropriate scanner to handle the size of the document,” he said.
“I look forward to addressing this issue again with our commission in hopes of beginning a process that secures, and allows these records to be searched, viewed and printed from home or in the county clerk’s office,” said Poss.
Business Information Systems (BIS) offers a “Minutes Program” software which provides the capability of scanning documents including county commission minutes into the server and sending them to BIS for Optical Character Recognition conversion. Once scanned, a user can access the software to search any documents that have already been scanned. Benefits of the On-Line Minutes Program are that it is a web-based service and it is free to the public to search and print records without having to contact the county clerk’s office.