Republican National Committee, Washington, DCs

The GOP has been around for a long time. There’s a lot of history and tradition there, which brings with it a number of historical documents, confidential letters and public records. In short, a lot of paper!

The Republican Party, organized in 1854, originally came together as a coalition of political groups wanting to abolish slavery. The Republican National Committee (RNC) was formed in Washington, D.C., and keeps all the organization’s records. These records documented a number of historical events, including the GOP’s support for women’s right to vote in 1896 and President Theodore Roosevelt’s difficult decision not to seek a third term.

When historians and staff needed to look at the papers that recorded these and other events, members of the RNC became concerned. Many of the records were over 100 years old. Handling them and even exposing them to light could damage the priceless documents. They needed the help of Laserfiche’s Document Management .

“When our staff and authorized historians need to access Republican Party archives, electronic files are an ideal medium,” says Melissa Price, special projects coordinator at the RNC. “Digital archives allow users to conduct searches for specific information and enable us to study our records without handling documents that become increasingly fragile as they age.”

The RNC asked John Montel of General Dynamics Information Technology, a Virginia-based Laserfiche Reseller, to help. Montel set up the system to allow the RNC to scan, store and retrieve all their important documents with Document Imaging.

The first records the RNC scanned electronically and preserved as digital images with Document management Software were from the 1856 convention, at which John Fremont was nominated for the presidency. Just four years later, the records chronicle the nomination of Abraham Lincoln, who went on to lead the Union through the Civil War.

Included in the RNC’s Laserfiche files are the records of each Republican convention and twice-yearly party meetings.

Price says the document archives are currently accessible over the Internet to Republican Party staff members and authorized scholars. Party records and historic documents, protected by security codes, are searchable remotely with Laserfiche’s Document Management Solutions WebLink. WebLink makes documents available on the Web without HTML coding.

Price says she is honored to be involved in their preservation at the Party headquarters, noting that they will be precious assets to future generations.

Empowering ECM Users

Managing past and current septic permit applications for areas totaling just over 425,000 residents without an enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management solution meant a lot of paper trails and time-consuming manual processes for Idaho’s Central District Health Department (CDHD). “As each year passed, it became increasingly more difficult to locate documents without spending large amounts of research time to do so,” says Margaret Ross, IT Manager of the Boise-based CDHD.

Serving Ada County, Boise County, Elmore County and Valley County, CDHD manages the Board of Health and the Community Health, Communicable Disease, Immunization, Reproductive Health and WIC Departments in addition to the Environmental Health Department. The planning and zoning authority of each county requires the Environmental Health Department to review every subdivision’s application for sewage permits, which can include:

Test hole inspections for sewage installation.

Plot plans.

Building permits.

Zoning certificates.

“Paper copies of the records were located in each county’s office, which made them difficult for us to access without a lot of copying and faxing,” Ross explains. Efficient storage, Document Imaging, organization and access to the documents crucial to the permit process was compromised until CDHD decided to implement Laserfiche ECM.

Powering Permitting

After the previous director of CDHD saw Laserfiche featured at an environmental health conference in 2004 and was impressed with its agility and Document Management Software, the department decided to implement the software later that same year. The initial objective was to find a program that could scan in past and present septic permits and applications, while providing central access to the records across all the offices in the health district.

Today, CDHD uses Laserfiche not just to scan and store permit documents, but also to enable external clients to access the information themselves using Laserfiche WebLink, which provides read-only access to records stored in the Laserfiche repository. Clients include:

Realtors selling homes that need permit information for potential buyers and appraisers.

Septic pumpers looking to access permit information to find the location of septic tanks for pumping.

Septic installers who are on-site and legally in need of a copy of the permit before proceeding with the installation.

Although clients applying for permits are supposed to provide a copy of their permits to septic installers (permits are required on the job site at all times), this frequently doesn’t happen. In the past, installers would have to come into the department and wait for a copy of the appropriate paperwork to be located and copied, or sometimes faxed over from the appropriate county. “Locating permit information for clients sometimes took hours to accomplish,” says Mike Reno, Supervisor of Land Based Programs for CDHD. “It slowed things down for both us and them.”

He continues, “With Laserfiche, the installers and other external clients can view the permit online and print their own copy if needed. This saves our clerical and field staff a lot of time making copies of permits and faxing them over.”

Ross notes that CDHD saw a significant reduction in information requests from external clients and that they continue to decline—especially from realtors—as clients realize most of their questions can be answered by accessing Document Management Solutions Laserfiche WebLink through the department’s Webpage.

“The ability to access data that resides in other offices is extremely helpful. It’s my favorite feature,” Reno says. If for some reason clients are unable to access the internet and attain records themselves, Reno can pull up the permit information on his desktop and provide the information within minutes.

With secure and easy public access and more efficient staff response time, Ross is pleased to report that CDHD “can concentrate on customer service, not paperwork.”