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The Challenge: Parke County, Indiana—with scenic roads and 31 covered bridges, promotes itself as the covered bridge capital of the world. The county features expansive Amish country where visitors can relive America’s past through many restored historic buildings and communities. In 2009, when County Recorder Mary Jo Harkrider needed to create microfilm images of mortgage, tax and other property documents dating back to 2005, as required by Indiana State law, she faced a potentially expensive and time-consuming process. Every document the county produces is considered a 
permanent record and must be copied to microfilm -- which is guaranteed to last up to 500 years. Documents the county produces include property deeds, original mortgages, modifications to mortgages, mortgage satisfactions, federal tax liens, powers of attorney, lease agreements, and property surveys. “The microfilm process can be expensive due to the manual processes involved, and we have records we don’t want to remove from the county office,” Harkrider said. “We knew it would be expensive to hire a firm to come on-site and scan all the documents, which would also be disruptive to our daily tasks in servicing the citizens of the county.”
The Solution: Parke County had worked with a firm to store older microfilm but felt a switch was needed due to the high off-site storage costs as well as inadequate customer service. Harkrider turned to Manatron and its Backfile Conversion Services, which allow government agencies to duplicate documents that exist in one medium—paper, microfilm or digital—and produce a copy in another medium. The conversion of documents creates copies in other forms that are more suitable for another purpose, such as storage. And by producing a copy of the documents, the conversion protects the original from wear-and-tear caused by frequent handling and the passing of time. For Parke County, the Manatron Backfile Conversion Services specifically offered the ability to easily scan documents and create images for all documents that had been created manually. Parke County staff members simply scanned in-house documents, saved the images onto CDs and shipped the CDs to Manatron, where two microfilm copies are created. One copy is shipped to Parke County for onsite storage while the second copy is safely stored in Manatron’s secure, climate-controlled storage facility. The storing of a back-up copy in such a facility is required by State law. “The Manatron solution allows us to store a hard copy, a scanned copy and a microfilm copy on site so that we can quickly react to citizen inquires in a variety of ways depending on each request,” Harkrider said. “But we also have an extra copy off-site at the Manatron storage facility just in case a disaster strikes our building.” The off-site Manatron storage facility is a self-contained, climate-controlled building with temperature kept at 68 degrees and humidity maintained below 35 percent. The facility is also dust-free with 24/7 security and no direct street access. Water, which can easily damage microfilm, is not present at the facility. If a fire occurred, Manatron would use Novec, a fire-protection fluid that is an advanced Halon replacement and balances industry concerns with human safety, fire-suppression performance and the environment.
“The level of security and safety provided by the facility ensures the integrity of our data even in a major catastrophe,” Harkrider said.
The Deployment: The process to deploy Backfile Conversion Services was nearly invisible to the county staff. Manatron configured the solution remotely through WebEx sessions to properly format document images going back to 2005 that were already scanned into the system. After formatting the images, Manatron shipped a plug-and-play hard drive to Parke County to download the files. The staff then shipped the drive back to Manatron, where the images were transferred to microfilm. “Since we are a small office with just three desktops, it was helpful to not have someone in our way while deploying the solution,” Harkrider said. “We were able to continue doing our jobs and servicing county citizens while Manatron was able to do what they needed remotely. They also did not need to remove records from our office or bring-in any equipment. It’s a very simple solution without any road blocks.” Going forward, Parke County will transfer new images to microfilm on a monthly basis. Harkrider’s staff will scan documents daily and create a CD once per month with the images, and Manatron will then convert the images to microfilm. Within one to two weeks of receiving the CD, one microfilm copy will be shipped back to the county while the second copy will be sent to the secure storage facility.
The Benefits: “The Manatron scanning and microfilm methodologies are much easier and less costly than having someone come in and perform the tasks on-site,” Harkrider said. “We have the freedom to scan on our own schedule as our workloads allow, and we have seamlessly worked the task into our weekly routines as an on-going project—with very little impact on our overall workloads.” County staff previously would copy every record into a book and log the documents by hand. Because of the ease the Manatron Backfile Conversion Services provides—both for scanning and microfilm conversion—the county staff can perform its daily tasks without having to take on extra work related to the microfilm process. “Scanning automates these tasks and has allowed us to downsize from two copiers to one because we no longer need to copy documents all day long,” Harkrider said. “We just quickly scan each document into the Backfile Conversion Services application.” In addition, the county’s storage fees have dropped considerably. Rather than charging a high, annual storage fee like the previous provider, Manatron charges a low fee by the roll, so Parke County only pays for the actual storage it needs, which keeps the cost as low as possible. But perhaps the biggest benefit Manatron provides is peace-of-mind. “We are very confident in what Manatron does and how they safeguard our records at the off-site facility,” Harkrider said. “We know we are in compliance with Indiana State law and that our backup records will always be accessible even if a disaster occurs at our offices.”