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| dtSearch Case Study — Westbrook
Technologies |
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| File
Magic With dtSearch Helps County Assessor Manage Archival
Records |
“Rising
costs of microfilm equipment and the inability
to perform quick and effective searches have
been eliminated ... thanks to File Magic and
dtSearch.”
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Every county assessor's office has
faced this challenge: a building owner requests
information on what his or her property looked like
several years ago, perhaps to settle an estate or
provide audit information to the IRS. Maintaining
these types of historical records can be a real
problem—finding the right files from a wall
of filing cabinets, making copies, and trying to
keep original documents intact over years of repeated
separating, copying and recopying. At the county
courthouse in Muscatine, Iowa, Assessor Dale McCrea
knew it was time to find a better method to archive
records and generate historical reports. With between
15,000 and 20,000 documents being generated each
year, the assessor's office was buried by paper.
Municipalities of all sizes are now realizing
the advantages that going digital can bring to
their operations. "For someone already equipped
with basic computer hardware, a stand-alone imaging
system can be set up for as little as $5,000-$10,000,"
says Ed Hanna, a consultant with Lerch & Thorin,
Rock Island, Ill., a computer consultant and system
integrator who helped Muscatine County set up
their File Magic document management system from
Westbrook Technologies.
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In Muscatine County, the assessor's office scans
all property records and associated correspondence
into File Magic. Documents are indexed so they can
be retrieved by name, address or district/parcel
number. The recorder's office is using File Magic
to maintain permanent records such as deeds, contracts,
surveys, and birth and marriage certificates, handling
some 10,000 documents a year which had previously
been stored on microfilm. A custom program was developed
to integrate File Magic with CMS, a UNIX accounting
system. The document is entered once into CMS, and
a header sheet is output to File Magic for automatic
"point-and-shoot" indexing. Point-and-shoot
indexing allows the user to press the computer's
mouse to highlight an area of text on a document,
and "shoot" it to an index field without
typing.
All Mucastine County offices are using full text
indexing from dtSearch. This allows clerks to search
by keyword without the need for manual data entry.
"Rising costs of microfilm equipment and the
inability to perform quick and effective searches
have been eliminated in Muscatine County, thanks
to File Magic and dtSearch," said Westbrook
Technologies’ Marketing Director Mitchell
Hallock.
McCrea expects their technology investment to pay
off over time through reduced costs for microfilm,
off-site storage and man-hours. "We researched
this carefully," he said. "There were
systems out there that would have cost more. The
key was making an investment into a system that
would meet our current needs and will grow with
us into the future. Finally, we feel we are not
a step and a half behind."
For more information on File Magic and other products
of Westbrook Technologies, please call 1-800-WHY-FILE
or visit Westbrook Technologies on the Web at www.westbrooktech.com. |
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