Hidalgo County continues to preserve records digitally

EDINBURG — The decaying record books that Hidalgo County Clerk Arturo Guajardo took to the State Capitol in 2001 didn’t look like they would last much longer.

The books dating back to the county’s inception in 1852 were in poor shape with book bindings unraveling and loose pages falling out, Guajardo said recently as he gingerly flipped through one of the oldest records.

With support from the county’s Legislators, the Hidalgo County Clerk’s Office — the county’s official records manager — secured a $5 fee to preserve its historical assets and begin a process to digitize its records.

“Our battle was, ‘Hey, these books are falling apart,’” recalled Guajardo, who at the time was the chief deputy for then-County Clerk J.D. Salinas. “‘This is the history of Hidalgo County, and we need to
protect it.’”

Guajardo, whose office has spent $2.5 million to digitize its records using the fee, said the bill was the first step toward running a courthouse as a paperless environment.

The District Clerk’s Office will soon join them in an effort to put all records at the county’s courthouse into a digital format.

DIGITAL RECORDS

District Clerk Laura Hinojosa and Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa pushed through legislation in the regular session that allows district clerks to assess a $5 fee to manage their court records.

The district clerk has records dating back to the 1800s, most of which were never put on microfiche and exist only in the hard copy.

When both criminal and civil cases are filed in district court, a similar $5 fee will be tacked on for her office to scan and store all of its digital records, she said. The fee will make the district courts less reliant on hard copy files and more efficient in their file retrieval process.

More than 20,000 boxes of district court files are housed offsite by a document storage company contracted with the county.

The district clerk’s office isn’t required to keep all of those records as statutes regulate when some of them can be destroyed, she said. But Hinojosa is reluctant to destroy even the records that the law allows since there is no other backup of the file.

She said digitizing records in a process similar to what the county clerk has done would preserve those files.

It’s not a complete shift toward a courthouse where court files never exist in anything but an electronic format, she said. But it is a step toward a paperless environment.

“People want to see a hard copy,” she said. “I don’t think we’re at a point in our lives where going paperless is the norm, but we’ve got to have a plan to get there.”

EASE OF ACCESS

Since the County Clerk’s Office started collecting the fee eight years ago, it has scanned 900 million pages to create an electronic database of all its official records.

Historical assets such as the first Commissioner’s Court are now viewable electronically, reducing wear and tear from researchers and preserving them forever.

More records — birth and death certificates, deed records, marriage licenses and plat records — are also digital, making Hidalgo County the first in the state to have its entire library in digital format.

The process streamlined operations for the county clerk’s office by cutting down the time required to find files, Guajardo said. It’s easier, for example, for the office to deal with a huge increase in requests for birth records with new federal passport regulations.

With most of his records in digital format, Guajardo’s attention is turning back to the original books he took to the Capitol in 2001.

The scanned pages are preserved electronically with the actual records stored in a nearby warehouse, but he wants to implement work to store the original pages of some of the more important historical assets in a static-free, fireproof casings designed to extend their life for centuries.

Guajardo said it’s the next step to preserve those records for forever.

“It’s still a work in process,” he said, “but we’ve come a long ways.”

Jared Janes covers Hidalgo County government, Edinburg and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4424.