Rotorua District Council

Rotorua District Council’s collection of paper property records took up so much space they were faced with moving part of their business out of the council’s main offices.

With no back-up, the collection, including historic records dating back to the city’s earliest days, was vulnerable to flood, fire and theft.

Accessing records was complicated. Only one person could use a file at once and obtaining access to Rotorua property records from elsewhere in the country was a time-consuming process.

The solution was to relocate the Council’s 44,000-file collection to Desktop Imaging’s facility in Tawa where it could be stored securely while being digitised.

The process involved a combination of on-demand scanning as files are requested and ongoing back-fill of other files. The digitised files are delivered via FTP and integrated into the Council’s document management system.

The files are multi-page PDFs for each property broken down and categorised according to their content. The Council set up nine document categories with Building and Resource Consents generating one per consent. Files were scanned using a combination of bitonal and colour scanning as required.

The digital shift was achieved in just under two years. The Council’s records are now available for access round-the-clock, can be e-mailed on request, and can be accessed by multiple people simultaneously.