PORT TOWNSEND — Jefferson County Superior Court is moving into the 21st century by putting remaining microfilm into digital form to make documents more accessible.
“We are required to keep records for the benefit of the public,” said Superior Court Clerk Ruth Gordon.
“We are required to keep them forever. It’s a permanent record.”
Jefferson County was founded in 1852, and the current courthouse houses court filings since about 1900, Gordon said.
Some of the older records and the newest ones are on paper, while the vast majority is on cumbersome, hard-to-search microfilm.
In the transfer project, the microfilm will be digitized one reel at a time and will be readable on a standard computer monitor that provides the ability to click to move between pages.
Contrast will be adjustable, and the printed pages will be more legible than the paper originals (if they still exist).
Superior Court clerks are required to catalog, scan and archive files so they can be accessible to anyone who wants to inspect documents.
When Gordon took office in 2005, she deferred any further transfer of documents to microfilm because of the time and expense required.
Gordon said that she never wanted to spend the money on microfilm and that she favors direct digitization of paper records and bypassing the microfilm process “because it is the wave of the future.”
Documents were required to be scanned to microfilm and held for five years until they could be destroyed.
Gordon deferred microfilming while seeking permission to digitally convert the pages into .tif files directly.
The permission to do so was granted this year by the Secretary of State’s office, in an action that “will save us a tremendous amount of storage space,” Gordon said.
It also saves money.
Scanning individual pages costs 1.5 cents per page.
Gordon did not know how much direct digitizing of paper and microfilm costs, but said that skipping the microfilm step will save the county about $10,000 a year.
“It’s definitely budget-friendly and will provide ease of access,” she said.
“These records are already microfilmed and they are already safe,” she added.
“This process doesn’t make our records any safer, but it does make the material more efficiently available and saves the cost of microfilming on an annual basis.”
Some larger counties use a digital filing process that bypasses paper filings entirely, but Gordon said that won’t happen in Jefferson County for some time.
“We will continue to be paper-based for the time being because that’s how the judge works,” she said, adding that converting to a fully digital system would take time, resources, equipment and money — all lacking in the current budget environment.
The technology may be new, but Gordon said it fulfills a purpose defined nearly 200 years ago.
“There are instances in history where they have not been honest and fair, and that’s why states formed in post-Jacksonian times have separately elected clerks whose job it is to keep the records of the judge who is meting out the justice separate so the record can’t be altered,” Gordon said.
“It’s important to have a permanent record of the court that can be accessed easily by the public because the powers of the government are so potentially onerous,” she added.
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
