TRENTON, NJ - In ceremonies held in the New Jersey State House, Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells announced today the recipients of the Third Annual PARIS Awards for Excellence. Recipients were presented their awards from Secretary Wells and Doug Robinson, Executive Director for the National Association of Chief Information Officers (NACIO).
Nearly 100 state and local officials attended the ceremonies. Mr. Robinson presented the keynote address, applauding New Jersey for launching a program that has become a national model for meeting the challenge of managing local government records in the ever-changing world of electronic data management.
In total, eleven awards in nine categories were given by the Secretary of State's Division of Archives and Records Management to outstanding county and municipal governments participating in the PARIS Grants Program, 2007-2008.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category I, Shared Services, was awarded to Somerset County for sponsoring a shared services project to provide records reorganization and purging services for all of its 21 municipalities. It was the first county to be awarded a grant for such a large shared services project and through expert project management, was highly successful. With a PARIS Grant of $450,000, the County re-organized a total of 13,602 cubic feet of records and has received approval to destroy over 5,676 cubic feet of records resulting in an annual savings of almost $20,000 in storage costs for each municipality in the County. With the completion of this project, the municipalities of Somerset County now have intellectual control of their records allowing them to move forward with other records management projects.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category II, Public Online Records Access, was awarded to Monmouth County for its Open Public Records Search (OPRS) system. The County expended $444,982 to design this system which not only increases access to public records by local government staff and the public but creates an efficient means of sharing data and records between local governments as well. The system's major functions include tracking all incoming OPRA requests, management of all internal and external forms, the ability to author, edit, and publish for web access meeting minutes and agendas, land and tax record lookup, administrative functions such as a centralized database and image repository, security and backup of data, and disaster recovery capability. Through this project, the county is providing servers and infrastructure improvements at the Monmouth County Information Services Department, the host site, while municipalities are provided computer workstations and scanners and a high speed Internet connection. Permanent records will be accessible as the OPRS expands into more county and municipal offices. In addition, the County is piloting the development of a municipal ordinance management module which will enable municipalities to manage the entire workflow of creation and updates to ordinances, including audit review and public notice, with expansion of the module to all municipalities after the completion of the pilot.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category III, Records Management Website, was awarded to Salem County. Salem County's Office of Archives and Records Management, has established a records management website highlighting staff contacts, duties of the office and referrals to other appropriate records management sources of information. In addition, the Salem County website includes records management related press, project status reports and a time-line of Salem County history. Salem County staff and members of the public can easily find records management officials within the government thanks to this website.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category IV, Historical Records Focus - County, was awarded to Bergen County. Prior to the inception of the PARIS Grants Program, the County of Bergen had established an archive room for historic documents within its Division of Cultural and Historic Affairs. Bergen utilized $32,237 in PARIS funds to enhance this archive room by scanning 17,680 pages of Freeholder minutes from 1804-1946 into a public access electronic document management system, to convert a manual index to an electronic file to link these images and to install shelving and purchase archival file folders and document cases, increasing storage space by 25%. This project was effective due to the fact that the County focused on digitizing historic documents as well as providing for the proper housing of these documents enabling them to be retired and therefore preserved for future generations.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category V, Historical Records Focus - Municipal, was awarded to Trenton City for reorganization, re-boxing and labeling of historic documents. With the help of a detailed historic collection report, funded by a previous year's PARIS grant, the city expended $70,682 to organize, sort, label, inventory, re-box and apply retention schedules to records from the Clerk, Sewer and Engineering Offices. From the Clerk's office, minute, resolution and ordinance books dating from the 1800s to the 1950s were discovered and preserved. From the Sewer and Engineering offices over 8,000 maps and plans were identified, labeled, inventoried, and re-housed. Archival-friendly shelving was procured and installed, including proper furniture to store both rolled and flat maps.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category VI, Disaster Preparedness, Prevention and Recovery, was awarded to Hunterdon County for the completion of a diverse ring wireless construction project that has been initiated by a previous PARIS grant. For this project, the County expended $509,670 to establish this network infrastructure, or "backbone," improving efficiencies in the sharing and dissemination of information. In addition to increasing the search and retrieval abilities of the Records Manager, enabling quicker response to OPRA requests, the resulting enterprise-wide electronic document management and imaging deployment mean that the county can finally implement an effective disaster recovery plan.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category VII, Enterprise-wide Imaging System - County, was awarded to Sussex County. Sussex County expended $69,510 of PARIS Grants funds and $136,000 of its own funds to implement a county-wide Electronic Document Management System (EDMS), focusing on the records of the Clerk of the Board and Engineering and Planning. The project also included back-file scanning for the Office of the Surrogate and Board of Elections. The completion of this project allows the county to move forward with substantial shared service offerings to its municipalities. Sussex County acted to help its municipalities benefit from the project by identifying existing imaging systems throughout the county, helping to get them certified by the state, and integrating them into the EDMS.
The PARIS Grants Award for Excellence in Category VIII, Enterprise-wide Imaging System-Municipal, was awarded to Cherry Hill Township. Cherry Hill Township expended $125,000 to partner with Gloucester County to develop a pilot program to image vital records, resolutions, and minutes, implement day-forward scanning in the Clerk's Office and provide training for all users, in order to improve public access, conserve historical records and ensure disaster recovery of vital documents. The project is a superb example of implementing and expanding a day-forward solution, while also providing back-filing of key records.
A special PARIS Grants Award for Excellence for Artemis Participants was awarded to Monmouth County, Salem County and Warren County for their work in the development of the automated Records Retention and Disposition Management System (RRDMS, nicknamed Artemis) hosted and maintained by the New Jersey Division of Archives and Records Management (DARM). This project was truly a collaborative effort: Monmouth County developed the software and system; Salem County provided procurement activities for the system's development and testing; Warren County tested Artemis with its own county records inventory management system to ensure already existing systems would be able to interface directly with the State's system. Artemis, which allows an agency to search retention schedules and submit disposition requests through a web based portal, was rolled out to New Jersey's 566 municipalities and 21 counties during the summer of 2009. Thanks to the support of these 3 counties, this project has streamlined the method in which records retention and disposition is handled in New Jersey.
The Public Archives and Records Infrastructure Support Grants Program is the nation's leading state program for upgrading the security, integrity and efficiency of local government records administration. Administered by the Division of Archives and Records Management (DARM) in the Department of State, PARIS distributes between $8 and $27 million annually to county and municipal governments to support archives and records management infrastructure improvements. Since its inception in 2005, PARIS has emphasized comprehensive strategic planning, promoting intergovernmental shared services, and encouraged enterprise solutions to records management challenges in the electronic information age, transforming local governments' business practices and responsiveness to citizens.
"It doesn't get any better than this!" acclaimed Secretary Wells as she commended the success of the PARIS program, continuing "Through a strong focus on shared services, more and more local governments are benefiting from the PARIS program, and counties and larger cities are offering centralized services. This has created an increase in government efficiency, while realizing significant cost savings to taxpayers." Karl J. Niederer, Director of DARM, shared this view, stating "The model of cooperative intergovernmental shared services nurtured through PARIS - encouraging the 21 counties to become archives and records management "hubs" serving both the county and the municipalities within their borders - is worthy of emulation in other states."
More information on the PARIS grants program may be found online at www.njarchives.org/links/paris.
To learn more about the diverse array of services and programs offered by the Department of State, visit www.state.nj.us/state.
