Lebanon County OKs $180,000 for scanning, PDFA conversion of civil records

Lebanon County commissioners voted to approve a $180,000 request from the Records Improvement Fund to scan and convert county civil files into archival PDFA format, a project county staff and a vendor said will both back up records and make them searchable online.

Barb Smith presented the request and said the project’s total cost is $191,542.80 and that roughly $300,000 remains in the Records Improvement Fund. Keith Reynolds of Reynolds Business System, the vendor on the project, told commissioners the work would convert about 2,100,000 pages to PDFA, produce two archival PDFA backup sets and a searchable “user copy” for staff and the public. “That would be 2 sets of PHMC compliant PDFs, 1 to be stored off-site and 1 to be stored on a server here at the county,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds said his company is a state CoStars vendor with experience working with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) to meet archival standards. He described the PDFA standard as an archival format intended to preserve documents for long-term readability and explained that PHMC accepted PDFA in place of microfilm storage in recent years.

Commissioners asked where existing records were stored and whether PHMC already held duplicates. County staff said some records had been stored at Iron Mountain, but the county had arranged for PHMC to hold backup copies at no cost, and that the scanned PDFA master and an off-site backup would meet PHMC requirements. Commissioners also asked whether scanned files would be researchable on the county website; staff and the vendor said a searchable user copy would be created for online retrieval while the two PDFA copies would remain archival backups.

A motion to approve the $180,000 request carried on a voice vote. The vendor said material lead time and PHMC compliance were part of the project timeline; commissioners authorized moving forward with procurement and implementation steps.

Next steps: staff will finalize contract terms with the vendor and proceed with scanning and PDFA conversion under PHMC guidance; portions of the project will be funded from the Records Improvement Fund and the remaining funds will be managed per the approved budget.