Routinely, residents of the county need records from the recorder’s office.
A resident may need information on property they are buying, a veteran may need discharge papers or someone researching family history may want to look up the history of property that has been in the family for generations.
Johnson County Recorder Teresa Petro is making it her mission to digitize, archive and index all of the records the recorder’s office is tasked with keeping for the county. With digitization and indexing, residents could do easier online searches for records they may need to get a mortgage or do genealogical research.
"Everything is going electronic," she said. "Look at how much is done online."
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The county has entered an agreement with Crowdforce to index records for the county.Â
The county has more than 400,000 records that have not been indexed that have been kept in the county’s recorder’s office since Johnson County’s incorporation in 1823.
A lot of the documents are digitized already, but Crowdforce’s work to index about 160,000 records in the project’s first phase will make them more easily searchable for county residents.
With the help of Crowdforce, Petro hopes to complete digitizing and indexing the county’s records in about four years. Internal efforts by part time staff members of the recorder’s office to do the same type of work would take about 16 years, Petro said.
"If I wait 16 years to do this, what is going to change," she said.
The county’s recorder office is tasked with keeping public records in the county. These typically include real estate documents, leases, subdivision plats and military discharge information.
Documents filed in the recorder’s office now are automatically digitized. Files that would need to be digitized and indexed are stored in large, bound books in the recorder’s office, on microfilm or in other media, Petro said.
Petro is the fourth county recorder that has taken steps to digitize and index records and previous recorders digitized and indexed through the 1970s and 1980s. But the work can be slow and four part-time workers work nearly every day in the recorder’s office to scan documents and get them into the internal system so they eventually can be searchable by the public, Petro said.
"We are trying to expedite the ability to obtain historical records faster and easier," she said.
Crowdforce will hire employees as independent contractors who will be paid 60 cents for every document indexed, with the work being able to be done from home. The company will then invoice the recorder’s office 90 cents a document for the work. Crowdforce is expected to begin hiring county employees to do the county’s work this fall, Petro said.
The invoices will be paid through the recorder office’s perpetual fund, which is where the fees for accessing some public records at the recorder’s office go. Crowdforce is for now, handling the first phase of the project.
Part of the job of the recorder’s office is to try and predict what the technology will be decades from now and how residents will want to have access to the county’s public records, she said.
"When you do things now, you have to think about what they will be looking for in 50 years," she said.
The public has access to records that are digitized and indexed now through several different systems. Residents who need quick information when the office is closed will be able to search the records online at any time, Petro said.
"It is all about making it available 24/7," she said. "In today’s world, if they want something, they want it right now."
