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Mahoning microfilm moving to larger, more secure quarters
Photo
Lucy DeMart, Mahoning County microfilm supervisor, stands with 2007 civil court case files in cardboard boxes that await microfilming. Her department’s four-person staff has been overwhelmed by the backlog of paper documents awaiting microfilming.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
milliken@vindy.com
YOUNGSTOWN
As Mahoning County tries to catch up on a backlog of paper court documents that must be transferred to microfilm, its microfilm department will move this year from the county courthouse basement to Oakhill Renaissance Place, where it will have larger and more-secure quarters.
The county commissioners said they may outsource some of the transferring of documents to microfilm to a private company to catch up on the backlog and eliminate the rows of court documents in cardboard boxes in a courthouse hallway that await transfer to microfilm.
Audrey Tillis, county budget director, said some of the court documents awaiting transfer to microfilm date back to the 1990s.
“There’s plenty of space for storage” of records at Oakhill, which is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center and now a county office complex, said Anthony Traficanti, chairman of the county commissioners.
“There are so many files. There’s so much retention that we have to do by law,” Traficanti said. “We’re hoping we can clean that up,” he said of the row of cardboard boxes.
“All the ones that are waiting to be done, we’re probably going to outsource” to a private company, said Commissioner David Ditzler.
The task of transferring court documents to microfilm has overwhelmed the county’s four-person microfilm staff, he said.
“We have a very small microfilm staff,” Tillis said, explaining the backlog.
“We’ve already remodeled and installed all of the cabinetry over there, and we’ve already been working on the space for months” in Oakhill’s basement for the microfilm department, Ditzler added.
“There’s just more room up there for them to work,” said Commissioner Carol Rimedio-Righetti.
“We’ve been working on trying to have a records center over there,” Tillis said, adding that the county clerk of courts has already moved many court documents to Oakhill.
The Oakhill space is needed for record storage because the quantity of documents generated by the courts far exceeds the ability to store them properly in the county courthouse, said Scott Grossen, clerk of courts office administrator. The microfilm department is now microfilming 2006 common pleas court civil cases, he said.
The county facilities department has performed painting, carpeting and electrical outlet installation in the new microfilm offices at Oakhill, Tillis said.
The budget director also said she could not provide an estimate of the total quantity of documents that await microfilming or the cost of outsourcing the work to a private company.
She said, however, the combination of outsourcing the backlog of work and acquisition of new microfilm department technology will eventually result in the county microfilm staff’s no longer having to develop microfilm.
The county’s microfilm department staff consists of Lucy DeMart, microfilm supervisor; Jessy Horkey, assistant supervisor; and Denise Yankle and Georgeann McDougall, microfilm technicians.
Computer images of the documents are often made as the paper documents are committed to microfilm.
“A lot of things that we do now, we are scanning” into a computer system, Tillis said. “It’s just a progression of moving into a more electronic environment.”
Most paper court documents can be shredded after they are transferred to microfilm, she said.
To assist in the conversion to newer records retention technology, the commissioners recently hired Horkey, who has a master’s degree in library science from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Traficanti and Righetti noted. Horkey began working for the county Jan. 20.
Microfilm, which has been used commercially since the 1920s, is a permanent record that takes up much less storage space than paper.
Sue Bisconti of Boardman, an independent land title searcher, said records in the courthouse and in the tax map department in the adjacent county administration building comprise a convenient one-stop shop for her research, and the move of the microfilm department to Oakhill might make access to its records less convenient.
“Our goal is, eventually, that everything will be able to be accessed through the computers, and it will be scanned documents, even the older records,” Tillis said.