The manager of computer services in the West Covina Unified School District, Mike Carmody, is a man who looks before he leaps. He spent almost six years looking before, late last fall, he finally leaped. "We came out with Laserfiche being the best bang for the buck," he said.

West Covina, known as the Heart of the San Gabriel Valley, is an upper-middle class city of 103,000, 19 miles east of Los Angeles. The school district includes eight elementary schools, two middle and one high school; and an alternative high school: altogether 9,000 students, about 400 teachers and administrators. The complex has generated more than a quarter of a million records -- personnel, student transcripts and business-office documents in the past five years: all on paper, in folders hanging in steel file cabinets.

"The employee records alone filled 44 drawers," Mr. Carmody said. "It was building up at the rate of about 2,000 sheets of paper per year." Until a half-dozen years ago, the district preserved its records on microfiche slides, Mr. Carmody said. Then came a budget squeeze. One year, then the next and the next, there were no appropriations for electronic storage of records. "We just accumulated paper," Mr. Carmody said.

But that brought more problems. The first, of course, was storage space. Then came quick accessibility of information. "You’d have to go to the file cabinets, find the right drawer, then pull out a folder and pull out pages," Mr.Carmody said. During the budget squeeze, the older records, of course, were still available on microfiche, but the microfiche readers needed repair, and there weren’t as many service people around any more. "Repairs can get quite expensive, if you have an older machine," Mr. Carmody said. "Just try to get an old typewriter repaired nowadays."

So, late last fall, the district installed Laserfiche, and as a first step, a sort of shakedown cruise, scanned in several years of school board agendas. "Now," said Mr. Carmody, "If someone in the superintendent’s office or the personnel office or the business services area or educational services wants to look something up in the board agenda, he or she can just go into the Laserfiche system and type in several words relating to it, and, in a second or so, actually bring up on screen the board agenda page that relates to that citation.

"We’re into Step Two now, employee records," he said. "Our total indications are that we have something on the order of 250,000 to 350,000 records – employee and student – that we’re scanning in.

"So that’s where we’re at. Document imaging is the next improvement, beyond microfilm or microfiching. It’s part of that continuous process improvement that occurs in any organization. A better technology came along and that better technology is document imaging. And then, you know, you go through the process of evaluating different document imaging packages – and we came out with Laserfiche being the best bang for the buck."

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