Council digitises records

By RICHARD WOOD

The North Shore City Council is digitising its 88,000 property and road records in a $1 million, three-year, storage and conversion project by Eagle Technology.

The project involves storage, document management, and imaging of 15 million documents ranging from A5 size to architectural drawings. During Christmas break all files were shifted to Eagle Technology's offices at Alexandra Park in Greenlane.

CIO Tony Rogers said files ranging in size from a simple folder to a storage box full are being processed at a rate of 100 a day. Eagle has hired 13 staff for the task.

The council is encouraging the use of public electronic access services by providing free next-day availability for a digitised copy on demand, compared with a $20 charge to have the hard copy sent over within four hours.

All electronic documents are accessible from kiosks at the council's Lake Rd premises in the environmental services building, but plans are to extend the service to libraries, other council offices, and the internet within six months.

Rogers said the public response had been overwhelming and 70 per cent of requests were for the electronic version.

In March 2001 the council centralised all hard-copy property files in one location, including plans, consents, liquor licences, Lim reports, hazards and complaints.

Rogers said the weight of the documents was too much for the floor. Alternative storage had to be arranged and the council took that opportunity to consider the digitising project.

He said that while new documents have been required to be electronic since March 2001 the council had procrastinated on digitising old files because of the sheer size of the project.

A big spin-off from the project will be security because unique documents can easily go missing, he said. And during the process torn documents are repaired, staples removed and duplicates eliminated.

Rogers said that after imaging, original documents would be retained but that would be reviewed at the end of the project. By law, council data about a property must be kept for the life of that property.

The DataWorks document management software uses a Hitachi storage area network application on Compaq server computers. Rogers said capacity was being added to the storage area network at a rate of a gigabyte a week.