Without scanning service, county stores court documents in bathrooms

Like unattended weeds in the garden, the paper files in an office can easily get out of hand if a proper document management plan is not put into place. Without one, it will not be long before bathrooms and other corners of the building are being used to store critical documents.

This was the issue that faced the Madison County Wood River Facility when it came to storing many of its sensitive court documents,including lawsuits, wills and evictions, according to the  Edwardsville Intelligencer. While the facility has been storing these kinds of documents for years, the sheer volume that is housed there has reached past its tipping point.

"We're actually overflowing on the fourth floor and using some of the bathrooms on the third floor to put files into. We've got padlocks on the bathroom doors," Circuit Clerk Mark Von Nida told the news source.

This is the second county facility this year to face a document storage issue, as the Madison County Courthouse experienced a similar problem of over-packing, which led to boxes upon boxes being housed in the basement against the walls.

Now, Von Nida is calling for an overhaul that would include the scanning and archiving of thousands of documents. There is already a system in place that requires all documents to be scanned but that was implemented in 2005. The new solution would start with the documents dating from 1995 through 2000.

The county would be wise to partner with a document scanning and management service that could come in and scan all required documents, without causing the facility to slow down daily operations.

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