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The Tompkins County Clerk’s Office has been awarded a nearly $140,000 New York State Archives Shared Services Grant to enable the County’s six towns to join the County in digitizing their municipal records through the County’s electronic document management system.

The $139, 291 Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund Award is the largest grant awarded to a County Clerk in New York State this year by the State Archives, a unit of the New York State Education Department.

The Shared Services grant will permit the County Clerk's Office to partner with the Towns of Dryden, Enfield, Groton, Ithaca, Lansing and Newfield, and extend to Towns countywide use of the County’s Electronic Document Management System (Laserfiche).

“The work our County Clerk's Office has done to digitize mountains of County records and documents information is truly remarkable,” said County Administrator Joe Mareane.  “With sustained help from the State, and a shoestring budget, Tompkins County has become a recognized leader in digital records among local governments in the United States.

“The results expend well beyond bragging rights. The work of County Clerk Aurora Valenti and Deputy Clerk Maureen Reynolds has saved the County the estimated $3 million cost to build a Records Center, vastly increased the accessibility of County records, and opened the door to sharing this technology with other local governments within the County.  I am grateful for the sustained support of the New York State Archives and also the vision and dedication of the County Clerk's Office for the groundbreaking work they have done."

Grant funds will purchase additional Laserfiche software licensing to accommodate the additional Town users; the scanning of 908,000 permanent Town minutes and building permits (using Ithaca’s Challenge Industries as the vendor); and the upgrade and expansion of the County's data storage capacity, with redundancy and disaster recovery between the two County data centers.

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