March 18, 2024

County records going digital

A historical records preservation project led by Jasper County Recorder Denise Allan will work to digitize county records going back 169 years.

At its Tuesday meeting, the board of supervisors approved the nearly $245,000 project with Cott Systems of Columbus, Ohio for digitization and redaction services.

“I am very excited about this,” Allan said. “The primary purpose for this is disaster preparedness. We know that you can have tornadoes and records can be gone.”

All records dating back to 1847 will be digitized and kept in a secure facility that will be housed by Cott, which is the county’s current software provider. The facility is heavily secured against any cyber attacks with around the clock monitoring.

“In case something would happen here, and it doesn’t have to be a natural disaster, it could be a fire and we could have water damage, I could lose all of my hard bound books,” Allan said. “These records are so important for so many reasons. There are bankers, attorneys, abstractors, a lot of people have business off of these records. I would say they are probably the most important records that the county owns.”

Allan also spoke about the beauty of the records that date back more than 150 years.

“The handwriting is just beautiful, and they are so important to preserve,” Allan said.

The digitization will also help wear and tear on the hard copies of the records housed at the courthouse.

An added bonus to creating digital copies, along with disaster preparedness, is the public’s ability to access them online. An online index will be available to anyone who can access a computer to search what is available in the records.

“You can sit at your computer 24/7 from home, go through the index books and find your record that you want to look at. You can click on the index and it will take to you to the image to see it,” Allan said.

Following the digitization, all records will be redacted for information such as Social Security numbers and bank records. Allan said it’s already done on all public records placed online by the county and it is standard practice.

“I’m a big proponent of this. It has been a long time coming,” supervisor Dennis Stevenson said. “It is kind of expensive, but I also know around the state, counties that haven’t done this and have had issues, Cedar Rapids was a big one, they spent all kinds of money trying to recover. If these records are ever lost, they are lost.”

County auditor Dennis Parrott gave an example from when he worked as the recorder in Page County. The courthouse sustained fire damage and had no backup records in place.

“At that time, there was the opinion that, if the county could not prove that a person owned a specific piece of land, they did not have to pay taxes on them,” Parrott said. “We could have had a lot of challenges from people saying you have to prove it. The county would have then had to do a lot of abstracting to try to recreate and it would have been extremely difficult.”

The digitization process will tentatively begin in late June or July.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com