Feb 2, 2003 By Steve Ostrosky 4 min read

WAYNESBURG – Dealing with thousands upon thousands of pages of active files for a number of Greene County offices, a group of elected officials is trying to come up with the best way to access the records without taking up so much space in several county buildings. The records and improvements committee met again last week to discuss the needs of each office and how best to allocate money collected from fees assessed by the register and recorder’s office.

Tom Headlee, Greene County register of wills and recorder of deeds, said a fee is added to each instrument recorded in his office, with some of the money going to his office and the rest going to the county. The county has $26,746 available for record storage and determining the best way of saving old records, some dating as far back as the late 1700s, he said.

Shirley Stockdale, clerk of courts, said a scanning system that all departments and offices could use would be beneficial. She said she has several dockets that are falling apart and need to be scanned and then placed in smaller books to conserve space.

She particularly has a concern with some older records, some of which are sewn together and are in jeopardy of falling apart. She said she knows something needs to be done, but she doesn’t know how or where to begin.

Debra Ellsworth, deputy in the prothonotary’s office, said the office has received two $5,000 grants from the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission to record old records onto microfilm. A third grant application went to PHMC in December, she said.

Scott Kelley, county budget and information technology director, said the county has made progress in printing reports generated in offices directly to CD, but the scanning of old records has been explored for several years.

“We’ve never had the money to do it, and we couldn’t do it again this year,” Kelley said. “We have most of the hardware here on site, but we need a scanner with a document feeder.”

He said the county will ask the Greene County Industrial Development Authority, as part of a grant the authority has received, to get software licenses for the county through the grant. Technology will be provided by Xerox Connect to provide “docucenters” for each of the county’s five school districts and at one of the county’s government offices.

County Commissioner Farley Toothman said the “docucenters” would allow digital records to be created and would give employees easier access to records, but he said the effort would be costly and could require a considerable amount of time.

Kelley said records are being stored in the basement of the courthouse, the basement and first floor of the County Office Building, the third floor of the Ben Franklin Building and the basement of the Fort Jackson Building.

Along with concerns about the amount of space the records are taking up in offices, records need to be kept in a climate-controlled environment, and most need kept in acid-free boxes to prevent the papers from deteriorating.

Officials discussed a possible off-site location to store records once they have been digitally imaged and placed on discs or CDs. One idea that came from the discussion is using a portion of the vacant Curry Home, which had been slated for the wrecking ball last year, to house the records to conserve space in county offices.

Chief clerk Gene Lee said the building is climate controlled and could handle the weight of all of the records to be stored, and he said the facility eventually could become a central storage site for other counties if the potential is realized.

For now, Lee said, county elected officials and other committee members will work to determine the number of records that will need to be imaged, and the committee will attempt to arrive at a cost estimate to accomplish the goal.