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Tompkins County Clerk Maureen Reynolds has announced that Tompkins County has been awarded a nearly $150,000 grant by the New York State Archives to extend to additional users the County's digital archiving records program.

Over the past four years, the County has been awarded nearly $600,000 through the State Archives Local Government Record Management Improvement Fund in support of the digital records management system.

The latest award will enable the County to expand the digital records management program to all 15 town and village courts in Tompkins County—the Village of Cayuga Heights, the Village and Town of Groton, the Village and Town of Lansing, the Village and Town of Dryden, the Villages of Freeville and Trumansburg, and the Towns of Ulysses, Caroline, Danby, Ithaca, and Enfield.

Funds will support additional software licensing, through the County's vendor, Lasefiche, to accommodate the additional users; the scanning of 985,000 permanent and long-term town and village civil and criminal files; the upgrade and expansion of data storage capacity; and the configuration of a new Forms software module, which will enable all members of the system to translate commonly used citizen paper forms to an electronic format while improving business processes, customer service and records management routines.

Since implementing the Laserfiche digital records system, the County has shared the service, and its records management and information technology knowledge and infrastructure with all other local governments within the County, with a user consortium (the Tompkins Shared Services Electronic Records Repository) in place to address design and support issues.

"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," Clerk Reynolds said.  "Collaboration, shared services, information sharing, and technology-based service delivery are the norm in Tompkins County.  These collaborative relationships with our internal and municipal partners have been instrumental in our receiving this shared services grant award for the fourth year."

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