The Clinton County Commissioners followed suit on Tuesday morning with what the Clinton County Council did the previous week by approving the agreement with Document Mountain of Kirklin to start a digitalization project and remove excessive weight from the fourth and fifth floors of the Clinton County Courthouse.
“It’s a little more complicated because there’s going to some historical documents, binders and ledgers that will go over there,” said Commissioners President Jordan Brewer. “But we have a lot of paper documents that will be able to be archived digitally and accessible. Some of that’s been needed for 20 years, I’m guessing.”
Document Mountain President Kevin Calhoun said in a presentation there’s a lot more paper than people would think upstairs in the courthouse. He said there are over 4300 boxes of records upstairs in the Courthouse weighs about 50 pounds a piece. That means there’s over 200,000 pounds of weight sitting in the building.
Calhoun added that keeping the paper in the upper sections of the building is not good and said they are not retrievable, not accessible and are at danger for physical storage.
Calhoun’s proposal was to digitalize the papers that they absolutely have to save and put the papers in a nice, safe place from most of the elements. He added his can be done in a year.
“Council had taken the first step by one, appropriated the money but also allocated it towards the bond issuance for the digitization project which consists of 14 million plus documents,” said Brewer.
The cost of the project is just under $1.8 million.