Town Clerk for the Town of Union Vale, Mary Lou DeForest, has been using the Laserfiche documenting system for several months and said it has already saved her a multitude of hours, and even days, in locating town documents.

According to General Code Publishers (GCP), a publishing company in Rochester, NY that collects and publishes town laws, Laserfiche is a document imaging system that provides instant access to documents and is used by close to 20,000 government offices and companies around the world. The software was developed in 1987 by Compulink Management Center, Inc. based in California.

DeForest stated, "Bruce Cadman, District Sales Manager for General Code Publishers, told me about this program. He scanned 25 years worth of minutes onto a disk and put them on my computer." It was only 25 years worth of documents, said DeForest, because prior to then minutes were handwritten and a handwritten document is a bit more difficult for the scanner to read.

Prior to Union Vale purchasing this software, Cadman came to a Town Board meeting in the Spring of 2004 to demonstrate the software for the Board members. The District Sales Manager typed in a board member's name and the software showed how many times the name was in the system. For a more detailed search, Cadman type in additional information to eliminate documents.

"I used to spend so much time reading all the minutes books (hunting for a specific document) guessing what year and then searching." Now DeForest types in a particular word or phrase and the software does all the searching for her in a matter of seconds. "It's going to be so much easier," said DeForest. Now when Town Board minutes are approved, the will be imported into the system, she noted.

LaGrange Town Clerk Kathleen Williams said she has been using the Laserfiche documenting system since the end of 2002 and is extremely pleased with the time-saving software. She currently has the single application use. "It's very helpful for me to be able to store and retrieve Town, Zoning and Planning Board documents," said Williams. "I can readily scan resolutions and legislation that the Town Board has adopted," which, she said, makes composing the minutes much easier. The system is very advantageous, said Williams, and she believes once users become proficient they will also agree.

Cadman states Union Vale has the basic program which can be expanded upon. He said, "It's easy to use and it's not outrageously expensive. It has worked for years in other places with great success." He added, "It's also a tremendous space saver when the documents are stored digitally." For example, said Cadman, a normal four-drawer filing cabinet can hold up to 10,000 pieces of paper. "You can store those 10,000 documents on one CD and the paper documents can be stored off-site." The positive feedback he has received from his customers has been phenomenal. Cadman said what he hears most from his customers is, "Thank you very much!"

The Laserfiche system takes images of the documents (either scanned from paper or imported from electronic files) and stores them in a file structure similar to the file tree found in Windows® Explorer. The images can then be translated from pictures into text allowing for full-text search of the documents. The program has full-text search capabilities, including Boolean searches, wildcard searches, fuzzy searches and proximity searches. The images that are stored in the system are exact copies of the original paper documents and cannot be altered once they are scanned. (The user security was originally developed for use in a federal installation for the CIA.) In addition, Laserfiche provides document templates for additional search criteria or for handwritten or non-textual documents, such as architectural plans or developer's maps, licenses or permits. Once stored, many individuals can access the documents simultaneously. The pages are captured as images which will exactly resemble the original page when being viewed or printed from the system. Captured images can be as small as a business card and as large as "E-sized" architectural drawings.

Laserfiche software is extremely simple and easy to use, said GCP. They added that individuals with little computer experience can retrieve documents quickly and easily. The interface is designed with common Windows conventions so it will be familiar to users.

"It's a really progressive step the town has taken. They had a vision to move in this direction," said Cadman.

GCP recommended a network client-server solution for the Town of Union Vale because the system can be utilized by many other departments in the future when the system is expanded. The Building and Assessors Office and Planning Board in Union Vale are looking into this time-saving system.

"It's worth every penny," said DeForest.

Reprinted with permission.
Copyright 2005 - Kathy Welsh. Mountain Heritage Magazine, LaGrangeville,NY.
Winter 2004-05 edition.

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