St. Mary Parish Scans Legal Records

St. Mary's Parish is similar to thousands of counties and parishes around the country, with a county seat (Franklin), small towns, agriculture and industry. Though it's not a major metropolitan area, the clerk of courts office stays busy with the criminal, civil and public records cases and paperwork that are common to governments of all sizes. For a small parish, St. Mary sees a consistent stream of documentrequests. Haydel says, "On average I'd say we make 75 copies a day. [We needed] to have somethingthat could work faster and would pick up the edges--the fine print andthe handwritten notes.

Becky Haydel is assistant clerk of courts for Saint Mary Parish. She is responsible for fulfilling many of the requests for information that come from members of the public. She says that there are a variety of factors that can make meeting the public need a challenge. "Many of our records go back as far as the 1800s, and they're not in as good a shape as the newer ones are," she explains. The older records are of interest to people with many different interests. Haydel says, "A lot of the abstractors who work for title companies, or people doing genealogy make requests because our marriages and criminal records go back into the 1800s. Some customers who write books need the information for the genealogy."

To help speed response to the requests while minimizing wear and tear on the physical records, the clerk of courts turned to A & E Office Machines, the company that had been selling and maintaining the copiers, typewriters and calculators for the parish. Company president Adam Crappel says that he began researching options for document handling, with a focus on dealing with the bound volumes of legal-sized documents that form the bulk of the records in the clerk's office, and was drawn to a recently-released Plustek scanner with touchscreen control. Crappel says, "I spoke with [Chief Deputy clerk of courts Jane C. Pilant], and we take care of their printers, faxes and now the scanner. I looked on the Internet to see which scanner could copy the legal size. When I located Plustek I called, spoke with Maggie, and we put a package together that we think is neat. We rely on our service to sell."

According to Mark Druziak, business development manager for Plustek, the solution A & E Office Machines installed is only offered through authorized Plustek resellers because it requires a lot of configuration for the "save scanned file" destinations. The system, based on the A300 document scanner, features a touchscreen book scanner that uses an A3 size plate. Druziak says, "The way the platen is designed and the optics and software are designed, it's really designed for scanning books. Typically you get a shadow are that runs up along the spine. This uses C technology to eliminate the shadowing area along the spine of the book."

Haydel says that the Plustek solution helps maximize the effectiveness of the clerk's staff. "We have 19 on staff to deal with the customer requests. The scanner is very user friendly, especially to my co-workers. Some can just walk up and place the book on the glass. Their main questions are how to make the copies darker," she says, explaining, "Right now, the quality has to be adjusted before the scan, but the contrast can be adjusted after the scan is made."Crappel says that there was significant configuration and software adaptation required before the system could be installed. "When we started, the software wasn't what we needed, but the kiosk (printer and physical stand for the system) came in and that made it easier. We started looking at a number of different products because the books [St. Mary parish] uses are very big. We used a screen that's based on a copier, put the scanner over it, and attached the touch screen. This system will be, in the future, connected so they can directly scan to their computer systems. Right now, they're scanning to a print, or to a customer's thumb drive," Crappel says.

Ease of use, to the point of requiring no training, is part of the intended set of benefits for the new A300-based system. Druziak says, " There's some custom software that comes with the system that makes it really easy to use, so anyone can walk up to the system and use it. They say it's the perfect tool for a library or publishing company. It's perfect for places that need scanning but don't want to do any training," he says, continuing, "They can scan the object and then save it to an of a number of locations. You can have it setup to show a group of saving options or only one or two. Our resellers configure the device the way the customer wants. "

While any highly-configured system sold through a reseller channel is going to have a price that's highly dependent on the nature of the specific solution, Crappel and Druziak say that the scanner alone should add between $2,000 and $2,600 to the cost of the overall solution. The ease of use shown by the GreenScan system is something Plustek sees as a clear differentiator now, but Druziak says that the specific advantage won't last long. "I believe ease of use will be seen in our products and those of a number of other vendors in the future. Some of our other products have "doc action," and that is basically push-button-based scanning. On the scanner, there's a button and a series of numbers where you can put stickers on the buttons and send the scan to a number of different locations," he says.