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The New York State Archives, a unit of the State Education Department, has awarded Tompkins County a nearly $150,000 Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund grant to further extend the County’s digital records management program.

The $149,972 grant, awarded in what Archives officials describe as a “highly competitive” year, will expand the program to share services with the county’s six villages (Cayuga Heights, Groton, Lansing, Dryden, Freeville, and Trumansburg) and the Tompkins County Soil and Water Conservation District.  The successful grant application was filed by the Tompkins County Clerk’s Office.

“Unlike larger governments, small local governments in New York State often do not have the resources to implement and support high-level uses of technology within their records management programs.  Often the best alternative is to pool resources and collaborate with other like governments, in order to provide access to technological efficiencies and eliminate redundancies,” the County’s grant application states.  “Tompkins County has implemented a digital archiving records program (Laserfiche) and is now able to support a hosted solution within the system for use by other local government agencies via a secure Internet connection, or other locally managed direct network connectivity. The shared services cost savings and advantages to the smaller municipalities include: the sharing of our records management and IT knowledge, IT infrastructure, hardware, software, user support, disaster recovery solution, backup, improved process efficiencies, and a user consortium (Tompkins Shared Services Electronic Records Repository—TSSERR) for design and support issues.”

Funds within this grant application will support additional Laserfiche software licensing; the scanning of 936,750 permanent minutes, building permits and soil and water conservation district files; the upgrade and expansion of data storage capacity; the improvement of disaster recovery; and the configuration of a new Forms software module which will enable TSSERR members to translate commonly used citizen paper forms to an electronic format while improving business processes, customer service and records management routines.

Two years ago, the County received an Archives Shared Services records-management grant to extend the County program to the Towns of Dryden, Groton, Ithaca, Lansing, Newfield, and Enfield; and last year received grant funds to share the services with the county’s remaining three towns (Caroline, Danby, and Ulysses) and the City of Ithaca.

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