Elizabether Croom, Morgan Naleimaile and Gaynelle Knight from the North Carolina Courts led a breakout session on Thursday afternoon at AIIM 2018 on what they’ve done to move into the digital age. NC has a population of over 10 million, and the judiciary adminstration is integrated throughout the state across all levels, serving 6,800 staff, 5,400 volunteers and 32,000 law enforcement officers as well as integrating and sharing information with other departments and agencies. New paper filings taking up 4.3 miles of shelving each year, yet the move to electronic storage has to be done carefully to protect the sensitivity of the information contained within these documents. For the most part, the court records are public records unless they are for certain types of cases (e.g., juveniles), but PII such as social security numbers must be redacted in some of these documents: this just wasn’t happening, especially when documents are scanned outside the normal course of content management. The practical obscurity (and security) of paper documents was moving into the accessible environment of electronic files.
They built their first version of an enterprise information management systems, including infrastructure, taxonomy, metadata, automated capture and manual redaction. This storage-centric phase wasn’t enough: they also needed to address paper file destruction (due to space restrictions), document integrity and trustworthiness, automated redaction of PII, appropriate access to files, and findability. In moving along this journey, they started looking at declaring their digital files as records, and how that tied in with the state archives’ requirements, existing retention schedules and the logic for managing retention of records. There’s a great deal of manual quality control currently required for having the scanned documents be approved as an official record that can replace the paper version, which didn’t sit well with the clerks who were doing their own scanning. It appears as if an incredible amount of effort is being focused on properly interpreting the retention schedule logic and trigger sources: fundamentally, the business rules that underlie the management of records.
Moving beyond scanning, they also have to consider intake of e-filed documents — digitally-created documents that are sent into the court system in electronic form — and the judicial branch case management applications, which need to consume any of the documents and have them readily available. They have some real success stories here: there’s an eCourts domestic violence protection order (DVPO) process where a victim can go directly to a DV advocate’s office and all filings (including a video affidavit) and the issue of the order are done electronically while the victim remains in the safety of the advocate’s office.
They have a lot of plans moving forward to address their going-forward records capture strategy as well as addressing some of the retention issues that might be resolved by back-scanning of microfilmed documents, where documents with different retention periods may be on the same roll of film. Interestingly, they wouldn’t say what their content management technology is, although it does sound like they’re assessing the feasibility of moving to a cloud solution.