Providing The Complete Solution!
Darlene Navis, the Register of Deeds in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, had been searching for a long time. The indexes to the County's vital records had never been backed up in any way. These 18 books hold the keys to finding any of the birth, death and marriage records within the County, and should disaster ever strike, Darlene would have no way of recovering the potentially lost information. It took three years, numerous phone calls, and a lot of patience, but Darlene finally found a vendor to scan the 12"x18" size documents when she contacted General Code.
During her search, Darlene spoke with many vendors that would only scan documents up to 11"x17" in size. To make her situation even more difficult, these indexes are used 
every day, many times a day. Sending them off-site to be scanned would not be an option. The records needed to be available not only to County staff to access the birth, death or marriage records, but also to genealogists who spend time each day in the County office conducting research. Finally, Darlene wanted to ensure that the scanning portion of the job would be as minimal a disruption as possible to the County employees and the public by having the scanning done after hours and on the weekend. When asked whether all this was possible, General Code Scanning Department said, "Absolutely!"
The scanning of the indexes took place over a four-day period starting at the close of the office on a Friday afternoon and ending by mid-day on the following Monday. Throughout almost 40 hours of scanning over that period, only four hours were done while the office was open. This ensured that the most frequently used books were available when they were needed.
With the scanning accomplished, the images were imported into a Laserfiche database and burned onto a CD for portable access. The text was processed with Laserfiche's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capability to make the images text-searchable. The users of the CD have the ability to type in the name or date that they are searching for and immediately have a list of results displayed. However, due to the age of some of the records, the type-face was too light to create a fully accurate OCR result. For records such as this, General Code worked with Darlene to establish a folder structure for the database that allows users to search the CD's the same as they would search the books, but without ever having to leave their desks.
Darlene plans to use the CD's to improve search efficiency in the office as well as to comply with disaster recovery rules by sending one set off-site for storage. Darlene is relieved to finally have this job completed and to have a plan in place to keep the database as current as possible. Each year the database will be updated to account for new additions to the records.
When asked about her experience with General Code, Darlene expressed her appreciation of the "Can-Do" attitude. From being willing to scan oversized documents, to working at the office during off hours, to being able to offer a flexible payment schedule, General Code was able to provide Sheboygan County a complete solution for their situation.
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