PUBLICATIONS

Background
The Allegheny County Prothonotary Office serving Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and its surrounding suburbs, represents the chief clerk of the Court of Common Pleas and provides a central point of administrative control and responsibility for keeping and maintaining official court documents. The Prothonotary office accepts documents for filing, issues writs, initiates execution proceedings, takes bonds in civil cases and processes appeals from the minor judiciary and administrative agencies. The Office also records notary public signatures, mechanics' liens, municipal claims and tax liens. All records maintained by the Prothonotary are available to the public unless sealed by the court.

Now, with the benefit of digital technology, citizens no longer have to drive to the Prothonotary office to view records. Instead they can download public documents via a web-based electronic filing and retrieval system that uses numeric codes to make it easy to track everything from traffic accidents to filings against property owners to civil actions and mortgage foreclosures.

Key Challenges
Accessing court pleadings and prothonotary indices wasn't always so easy. In September 2005, under the direction of the technically-savvy Chief Deputy Prothonotary, Eric Feder, the Office launched an ambitious backfile conversion. The intent? To digitize more than 1,000 aging, 14" by 18" prothonotary indices books into an accessible online digital library. The Office turned to Tri-State Reprographics, a local IDEAL / CONTEX dealer to find a scanner that wouldn't damage the original books. Tri-State worked with IDEAL to provide a CONTEX COPYmate™ 18 large-format, flatbed scanner to scan books that scanners with conventional roll-feed mechanisms couldn't handle.

The Prothonotary office's Oracle Database Administrator, Ravi Chellaiah recalls, "Before, people who had a lien or case against them and wanted to view records would have to physically come to the courthouse, locate the prothonotary office, open up the books and flip through them hunting for a record. Now more than 150 books are scanned and available as searchable PDFs on the web."

The Solution
The office uses the IDEAL / CONTEX COPYmate 18 flatbed scanner with WIDEimage™ software to scan the documents, repair any that are old, damaged, yellow or fading. They create TIFF files, and via batch processing, convert the files to Acrobat PDF and then to OCR format to create searchable documents. An operator/programmer scans the books and cleans up the images, while two dedicated employees create and edit PDFs.

"The IDEAL / CONTEX COPYMate 18 was the only way to go, because the indices are contained in oversized, bound books" says Chellaiah, "the IDEAL / CONTEX scanner is fast, delivers great image quality, is easy to use and install, and has a plug-and-play USB port for simple connection to the network."

To digitize the books the operators open up the scanner, place the books down, remove the binding, and scan one page at a time. "Each book has 300 pages, and each page becomes a TIFF file. In the batch process we turn each section into a PDF. Then we add securities and hyperlinks to the PDFs to create an index and allow readers to jump from page to page. We convert the PDF documents to OCR format to make them searchable, combining multiple PDF files to create one digital book." Chellaiaha concludes, "The response from the public has been positive. People no longer have to wait for someone else to finishing using a book to do a search and they can access the documents from the web. They log on to the electronic library, find the book and click on an index page to get records."

Conclusion
The IDEAL / CONTEX COPYmate 18 large-format flatbed scanner combines a clamshell design with 48-bit color capture, high-speed color and black and white scanning, and on-board iJET™ technology with an easily accessible operator panel to enable full scan-to-print or scan-to-file capabilities without requiring an additional PC or software. A large 18" x 24" scan area makes it easy to scan books, textured originals, originals with unlimited thicknesses, and rare, fragile or unusual documents. As for quality, the IDEAL / CONTEX COPYmate 18 employs high-end, 48-bit CCD technology and easy-to-use color calibration for accurate scanner calibration and high-quality output.