O.K., so maybe the Lake County Commission isn't stuck in the Stone Age. I finally get hold of Wednesday's MDL and learn from my neighbor Elisa that the county has budgeted $30,000 to lease some scanning equipment and hire Microfilm Imaging of Omaha to scan old plat and drainage maps and train county employees to continue the archiving of old commission minutes and real estate transactions [Elisa Sand, "County to Begin Scanning Old Documents in 2008."]
Wait a minute -- ten thousand computers in town, and we can't find someone local to spend our money on to scan those documents and make e-copies to a few hard drives? Heck, I think I know some bloggers who could put those plat maps online in a week!
Oh, but I shouldn't complain. This archiving vaults Lake County government to at least 1998 in terms of e-government. Scanning that old data is a good first step to getting our county records online so more people can access them. (Commissioners, you are contracting for electronic scanning, right? Not microfilm? Please, not microfilm.)
It seems that you have a lot to say about how other people run gov't. Maybe you should take out a petition to run for a spot on the Lake County Commission on 2008 along with Rod Goeman.
ReplyDeleteEverybody should have a lot to say about how we run our government. The government is us, not just the special purview of the handful who run and get elected.
ReplyDeleteRun with Rod Goeman? Boy, I don't know how well I could get along with a Republican... ;-)
It's every American's responsibility to be involved with the government. Some run, some comment, some vote.
ReplyDeleteWhat was that remark from Mark Twain, on the weather?
However, with government, talking about it _can_ have an impact.
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I hope they're doing digital images, and not (just) microfilm. It's not cheap to do, though. Getting a local distributed system to scan and QA public documents would certainly be interesting.... But I'd hazard a guess that even in a small municipality like Madison, you're looking at a doc-load roughly equivalent to what the Gutenberg project has already done.
It's quite probable that microfilm is a given -- it's proven, archival technology, whereas all this digital stuff is still going through a shakeout. Microfilm made 40 years ago is still readable (if stored properly), but can you read in those data-tapes from you C64 of 20 years back?
NB: I am speaking from a somewhat professional viewpoint, as I work for a document imaging company. I've worked on some county projects, digitizing docs dating back to the 1880s.
Run, comment, vote -- do one, do 'em all! Just do something, folks -- the government really is us!
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Good professional perspective, xrad'. Microfilm isn't as convenient for researching, but it's a lot more durable than any digital format. (Those C64 tapes -- I think I still have those! probably buried in the old junior high necktie collection...)
Since most of those ties were my father's, I hope you're storing them properly!
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid my museum curating skills don't go much beyond the Prairie Village level. But maybe I can borrow the county's new document scanners and digitally archive those neckties... add that to the list of post-dissertation projects.
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