office dockets civil filings for the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas. Older filings were preserved on microfilm and the microfilm was digitized about 15 years ago. However, the system that housed the digitized microfilm files melted down in 2012 and the backup server’s copy of the platform experiences significant glitches, specifically with regard to indexing. The lack of indexing on a significant number of these images means that the office cannot reliably search through more than one million images of civil court case documents from the 1960s-2000s. Instead, staff must look through microfilm reels in order to find public records requests; this is both time-consuming as well as unreliable because sometimes the records cannot be retrieved. To facilitate this project, we will need a vendor to sort through the millions of digitized microfilm images (some of which are duplicates), index them, and create a platform to house these images so that the office has reliable access to the digital files. Digitizing microfilm reels, indexing them, and making them available in the same centralized document management system is also part of the request.
