City to look into digitizing old documents
Process would make finding records easier on the city’s website
The City of Long Beach already has hundreds, maybe even thousands, of documents, both old and new, available to the public on its website and transparency portal ranging from council meeting agendas to budget information. Now, even more may be coming to the website for residents to see.
Acting City Manager Ron Walsh said at the Jan. 23 Chamber of Commerce meeting that there are a lot of old records in the city. In an attempt to get rid of the physical copies, the city is looking to digitizing them so they can all be online and not needed in physical form.
“We have a lot of old records in the city and some of these things are in trailers, some of them are actually in City Hall,” Walsh said. “So we want to start to digitize these and get rid of things. And, we have some FEMA money that will take some of the stuff that was damaged in Sandy and turn it into digitized format.”
Walsh said that they would potentially take the FEMA money and set up the program so that everything is digitized under “one umbrella.” So, the old documents would be scanned in and when they get scanned, it takes the text and turns the text into a searchable format.
When all the documents are digitized, Walsh said residents should be able to put in the word “boardwalk,” for example, and every single place that the word comes up in any document that’s been scanned should be able to be found.
“When you have paper documents, and you have hundreds or thousands of them it makes it very, very difficult to find anything,” he said. “So the efficiency in government and the time saved will increase. The ability for someone to come in and say ‘hey, do you have a record that says this?’ will be magnified.”
Walsh did the same thing with the Long Beach Police Department, where he is still the commissioner along with being the acting city manager. He said there were about five million records that he was in charge of. So, they digitized all the records and documents and now, he says they can find things from “1925 in 15 seconds.”
Walsh also announced at Tuesday night's council meeting that all City Council meeting agendas are now also available online in Spanish as well as English after there were requests for them to be translated. This is the first time this has been done.
There was no timeline or projected date when this would begin happening as the city is just discussing the possibility of digitizing old documents and records.
