Records getting reboot
By LEE PROCIDA
Cherry Hill Sun
11/28/2007

Cherry Hill among the leaders in statewide effort to make public records more accessible

In a statewide effort to overhaul local records keeping, Cherry Hill is one of several municipalities taking the lead.

The state Division of Archives and Records Management started a project in 2005 to organize records and make them more accessible, providing grants for new technologies and services to do so.

Cherry Hill was one of the first to receive these grants, and the town Council applied for another on Nov. 26 that will aim at digitally imaging important records.

Also, in the interest of saving resources, Cherry Hill is teaming with Merchantville and Gloucester Township to share resources, saving money and time for all three parties.

“The Cherry Hill example is an outstanding one where you’ve got a county and municipalities working together,” said Karl Niederer, director of DARM, “and instead of building three different wheels, you’re combining to all make one.”

The Public Archives and Records Infrastructure Support (PARIS) grant is for $465,000. It will provide for new hardware and services needed to index records, scan them and then upload them onto Cherry Hill’s servers. Merchantville and Gloucester Township’s records will also be scanned and made more accessible through this process.

“Gloucester and Cherry Hill had similar priorities to tackle, so it was natural,” said Ari Messinger, Cherry Hill records manager. “Cherry Hill has immense IT and structure backend. Smaller municipalities,” such as Merchantville, “can’t afford that nor would it be smart. So it’s saving them tens of thousand of dollars.”

It is estimated Merchantville will save $100,000 initially and $40,000 every year afterward through sharing with Cherry Hill and not buying its own hardware and software and hiring full-time IT employees, officials said.

Cherry Hill and Gloucester Township will also save money through this digital indexing process by not having to pay for as much labor to retrieve paper records stored in file cabinets.

The PARIS grant project was necessitated after the state passed the Open Public Records and Information Act in 2002, which requires quick retrieval of records.

Niederer said PARIS is not only important for local governments for their own efficiency but brings them into compliance with OPRA.

“The lifeblood of government is records. Decisions are based on those records,” Niederer said. “We knew municipalities needed help. OPRA just brought that into sharper focus.”

Niederer said the grants were necessary to help municipalities and counties pay for the projects without having to squeeze money out of already tight budgets. The amount of grants given out by DARM total $28 million, the most of any state in the country.

Cherry Hill already shares its information technology services with the Cherry Hill Fire District, Camden County, the Motor Vehicle Commission and the school district.

Because the township is so large and has already invested so much into its records management, it has been a top candidate for the PARIS grants, which is a competitive process supplying grants to departments that qualify for the most important projects.

Cherry Hill also benefited by working with other departments, something Niederer said, ideally, every municipality and county should do.

“It’s streamlining government and cutting costs,” Niederer said, because records will be available on the Web, can be accessed by multiple people at the same time and free up storage space.

“Enhancing and improving the records retention process and preservation, and having them in an electronic format will be an asset to all municipalities in the future,” said Mayor Bernie Platt in a press release, “and we are in a unique position to help other towns access this technology and share services.”