Amenia-Beekman-Dover-North East Shared Record Management Services Grant Press Conference

 

Amenia-Beekman-Dover-North East Shared Record Management Services
Grant Press Conference
Amenia Town Hall
October 27, 2015

Remarks by Town of Dover Supervisor Ryan Courtien

Today, on behalf of the Town of Dover and our partnering communities, the Towns of Amenia, Beekman and North East and Supervisor Victoria Perroti, Supervisor Barbara Zulauf and Supervisor John Merwin, I am very pleased to announce that our communities are the recipient of a New York State Archives’ Local Government Records Management Improvement Grant to purchase and implement a state-of-the-art electronic records management system to better secure our records and to increase public access to municipal documents through a shared web portal.

One of the major functions of local government is records management- everyday, official documents are generated, processed, stored and disposed of in order to conduct the people’s business. Limited or lack of records management technology in municipal settings is generally regarded as outdated and inefficient. Yet the cost to improve records management technology is mostly out of reach to small municipalities.

Over the past year, our respective town clerks namely, Katie Palmer-House (Dover), Rachael Rancourt (Beekman), Dawn Marie Klingner (Amenia) and Lisa Cope (North East) and the Dover’s Electronic Content Manager Roz Cimino have met on numerous occasions to plan and develop a shared services records management collaboration. The $130,452 grant we have received will allow our municipalities to acquire an advanced-level electronic content management system (ECMS) called Laserfiche Rio, with storage repositories and a dedicated server for each community’s digitized records. The ECMS software also will afford us to create a web portal for the public to search and download some records series through a weblink on our Towns’ websites. By the end of the grant project, our communities will have full collections of our Town Board Meeting minutes available on the web portal as well as one major land use project from each community. Moving forward after the grant, we anticipate adding new records series to the web portal based on areas of interest from our residents and the public.

Our partnership will continue after the grant project through the implementation of an ongoing intermunicipal agreement with commitments to maintain and update the software,  to share costs for IT and ECMS support services, and to help each other utilize the system effectively and efficiently.

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Author: Harlem Valley News