Document Imaging for Efficiency and Transparency in Agenda Management

Never before have local governments been under such scrutiny to ensure transparency of documents and records. Juxtapose such expectations with citizens’ desire for on-demand, easy-access to local government news and information using a variety of digital devices, and municipal clerks today are facing a unique challenge: How to make all necessary transparency documents easily accessible and consumable from any device at any time. In the quest for streamlined transparency, the importance of document imaging cannot be underestimated. There is little value to citizens for transparency documents to be available online if viewing them reveals they are poor quality, illegible, not searchable, and not easily downloaded or printed. To provide your citizens with the most stress-free access to digital files and records, understand the value of effective document imaging to your administration and your citizens, and then review our document imaging best practices checklist.

The Benefits of Quality Document Imaging for Municipal Clerks

Providing high-quality scans of your transparency documents is not just a nice-to-have component of your agenda and meeting management software. Consider the following citizen engagement benefits:

Cost-Savings

A Resources Information Systems Inc. study estimates that companies spend about $8 billion per year managing paper alone. Compared to the cost to maintain paper records, which requires document imaging hardware, storage space (both onsite and redundant offsite storage), and paid staff time, entities can significantly shrink their bottom line by moving to a primarily digital records management system.

Digital Data Storage Enables Analysis and Citizen Behavior Learning

How many citizens downloaded a copy of your fiscal year budget? How many requested absentee ballots? How many request agendas compared to the meeting minutes? Tracking such data manually in the era of shrinking staffs and budgets is nearly impossible. With a document management solution, however, such insightful analytics are only a click away—helping you better meet the needs of engaged citizens.

Data Security

If you envision the cloud as an intangible, non-secure digital myth, know that your agendas, minutes of meetings, forms, budgets, and financial documents are safer in a redundant digital storage repository than they are in a physical storage facility that is at risk of fire, natural disaster, or human error.

Digital Data Enables Greater Transparency Requirements

Depending on the laws of your state, your municipality may be required to meet specific document transparency accessibility rules. Without a digital solution, meeting a transparency request means a staff member (likely you) must answer a phone call or walk-in request by searching filing cabinets for the requested document. As minutes tick by, you lose valuable time in your workday, and your citizen feels the frustration of an inefficient system funded by taxpayer dollars. Document management systems that allow citizens to search from a home computer or mobile device for the document of their interest at any time of the day or night ensures your administration is meeting transparency requirements without consuming valuable time in your workday.

Best Practices Checklist for High-Quality Data Imaging

Your document management strategy should enable citizens to learn about issues and topics that impact your community—and their lives, helping them remain informed, engaged voters. To ensure your documents are accessible, readable, and easily consumable, follow these document imaging best practices:

Make Sure you Have the Right Hardware

If you are about to convert stacks of paper to digital files using a document scanning strategy, make sure you have access to a quality scanner that produces high resolution files that are compatible with your computer system.

Consider Access Restrictions

Before posting all documents from agendas to financial records, to personnel files within your local government website’s content management system (CMS), consider what documents need restricted access. Choose a document management system that allows for setting tiered access to file types. Remember, transparency is necessary, but some records are not meant for public consumption and may be protected by other regulations.

Make Sure you Have the Right Software

Once you have scanned your documents, you need a place to store them where they will be easily accessible by internal staff and by your citizens. Make sure you have invested in agenda and meeting management software that allows you to save and store files by type (e.g., agendas versus minutes of meetings), and that enables document searching using keywords for convenient and secure location.

Save Effort by not Converting Outdated Files

Before converting any forms to online versions, or saving electronic copies of past agendas, meeting minutes, support documents, or budgets, collaborate with internal teams to ensure they are relevant, in-use, and need to be accessed by today’s citizens. Depending on the regulations of your community, you may only need to make ten years of financial records accessible to citizens. Do not waste time scanning or converting any files that are outdated or that do not need to be available online. If required by law, continue to save them in hard copy only.

Create an Intuitive Naming and File System

When determining your file naming structure, consider gaining input from other departments as well, as what may seem logical to you may not reflect how other staff members will be searching for documents. Once you have a file naming convention and filing system in place, never waver from it. Consistency will enable you, your coworkers, and your citizens, to quickly find files in the future.

Follow Document Type Best Practices

For consistency and greatest usability and accessibility, store all electronic files in archive-quality portable document format (PDF/A). Most word processing software and scanning tools should allow you to save files in this format so that they are readily accessible using any desktop or mobile device. Note: work to keep file sizes as minimal as possible without sacrificing document quality. This best practice may be a challenge if you are creating 200-page agenda support packets, but you may consider a free PDF file size minimizing tool to prevent files from being too large for users to email, save or print.

Immediately Save New Files in their Proper Location

Messy electronic files are just as problematic as messy filing cabinets. As soon as you create a new document, save it (using the proper naming convention) and place the final version in its appropriate digital location. Records are not transparent if they only reside on your desktop or are only migrated to your document management system when someone specifically asks for them.

Scan for High Quality

When scanning paper files, set your scanner for the ideal resolution: 300 dpi (dots per inch). Depending on the file type, for best readability, scan documents in black and white (rather than grayscale) and only scan in color when necessary (e.g., maps). If an original report includes pencil or blue ink, you may need to darken the lines using black ink before scanning for best results. Try to ensure all original signatures that will eventually be scanned are executed using black pen ink for best digital output as well.

The Final Step: Create an Informative Governance Plan

After you have successfully transformed your outdated, paper-based processes into a modern digital transparency system, your next step should be to create a document governance plan. Share your final governance plan with all staff in all departments who will be accessing, building, and sharing files. The more departments that follow the same document management conventions, the better organized your administration will be, and the better able you will be to meet citizen transparency expectations.

Let our Agenda and Meeting Management software serve as the foundation of your public records governance plan. Click here to learn about our modern and user-friendly Agenda and Meeting Management software. Learn about our other records management software like NextRequest by exploring our software solutions for municipal clerks.