How Berks County, PA Automated Indexing in a Single System

Being that we were an early application of GovOS’ software back in 2008, they work with us to automate our indexes. Everything you have can be in one system. That’s the important thing that I see with GovOS. I see a lot of counties where they have a computer system for their land records, and it starts in the year 2000, 1990. And for all the records, you have to go onto this system, and all the records, you have to go onto that system. We were able, with their cooperation and their guidance, put all of our records, over 270 years’ worth of records into one system. And I think the truly amazing part of what that does is it gave us a backup of all of those documents.

So before we had GovOS, if we would have had a fire or a sprinkler system malfunction in our office, we could have lost our oldest records. And the only other copy of those were hard to use microfilm, and some were not microfilmed at all. So we could have lost some some vital history of our county. Now everything that’s digitized, which is all of our documents, is in the GovOS system, which is backed up off-site and retrievable in case we would have some disaster in our county offices.

So we thought we really wanted to get modern indexing of our old documents into the GovOS system. They set up various tasks and workflows for us where we had all of our images in the system. There was no data associated with them. But, you know, if you wanted to go look at deed book one hundred page twenty five, you could get there. But we wanted to make sure someone wanted to search the names that were associated with that particular deed, they could get there quicker. We were so caught up with our new recordings that to keep people busy when they were caught up, they would just switch over to the old document indexing.

So they’d pull up this document image in front of them, and they would search through it and find the grantors’ and grantees’ names, sometimes a property location, and more importantly, the date of recording, and we would index all those things. So now they became more like you’re used to on a new record. So we did that for all of our deeds going back to the founding of our county in the year 1752. So we always have some extra project work where GovOS has configured that for us so we can do those jobs. Without that software, we would have had a much more expensive process to outsource that to some other type of company to do it for us. Where here, we can do it ourselves.