County recorder plans CD-ROM storage switch

Montgomery is responsible for the storage of records of real estate transactions that take place in Greene County.

While the records are stored on her office’s computer network, the reams of paperwork generated by the county’s daily business are bound into bulky annual reports so that the information may be accessed in the event of computer problems.

“We only have room for another year, year and a half of reports,” Montgomery said.

Montgomery said the solution is CD-ROM document storage.

“It’s just a matter of downloading the information to a disk from the system,” Montgomery said. “So it’s not like we are reinventing the wheel with this.”

At the end of the year, Montgomery’s office will stop printing hard copies of the transaction reports, which are now printed each day.

“They are indexes to our records (that allow) people, if the computer system was down, to go back and find the book of page and be able to go to our microfilm and look up documents without depending on the computer,” she added.

Because those reports will be stored on CD-ROM, Montgomery said a backup option is important, particularly for newspaper reporters and others who use the hard copies to gather information to provide to the public.

“It’s like a public library. Once we go to CD-ROM, it is going to eliminate those hard copy books, so I am trying to plan in advance to accommodate the people who use these books. I know some counties have had computer problems, so I have always been very cognizant of the idea that if our computers go down, we need to have a way for people to search our records,” she said.

Safeguarding reports

While having auxiliary storage for these documents in place is certainly a matter of efficiency, according to Webster County Recorder of Deeds Stacy Atkison, it is essential in terms of safeguarding records in case of a catastrophic event.

“When I took office, there was only 20 years of microfilm for Webster County,” he said. “Then those tornadoes went through and hit Pierce City and Stockton, and I realized we only had that much on microfilm.”

Atkison sought bids and microfilmed Webster County’s entire vault. Now, microfilm for documents dated back to 1855 is stored locally, in Kansas City and in Jefferson City.

“So if disaster hit, we could recover, whereas previously, if we had a disaster, it would have stopped all real estate transactions,” he said.

No cost

Montgomery said the switch to CD-ROM storage will not cost the county money.

“When you have technology, sometimes it’s not very costly to do something like this. It’s just a matter of our programmer writing a simple program,” she said.

“Greene County has its own programmers who take care of every office in the county, so it’s just the cost of doing business,” she added.

Montgomery said that probably the hardest part of her job is keeping up with technology and making sure that she’s using the most efficient means to get information to the public. But it’s something she’s dealt with before.

Throughout the years, Montgomery has made several changes to ensure that the office operates efficiently.

“We’ve just tried to streamline and make sure that everything the public needs to look at is available, but still protect our books. We always try to find ways to improve our services at the least amount of cost,” she said.

“We were out of space when I took office in 1995, but I was able to reorganize the office by microfilming the old books and sending a lot of them to the archives. Everything is still in there and available. Any recorder’s office is going to have space restraints,” she said.

Atkison agreed, but said he’s been able to manage the space constraints.

“The latest numbers show that we are the sixth-fastest growing county in the state, and we have been in the top 10 for the last 12 years or so. As far as our storage goes, we have gone digital with all of our deeds and deeds of trust. The only things we keep hard copies of now are our plats and surveys,” he said. “It may be as many as 5,000 pages a month that we are storing digitally, so that is 5,000 pages a month of space that we are saving by doing it that way.”

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