By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

When you visit the Superior Court clerk's office to look up information on court cases or real estate deeds, you'll soon sit down at a computer terminal instead of digging through massive record books.

The clerk's office and the secured vaults where the records are kept are filled to capacity, said Jay Wright, county director of information systems. But a new, more efficient filing system designed to save space will make the records difficult to get at for as many as 20 people at one time researching court records, he added.

After studying the records system recently, Wright said, “The situation was a lot worse than I ever anticipated it would be.”

Price tag for scanning the records and making them available on computer terminals, plus the new filing system and construction cost to rearrange the clerk's office comes to $204,000, or the county can pay $7,059 a month to lease the scanning and computer equipment.

County commissioners last week decided to ask finance director Emory McHugh to analyze the question of whether to pay the onetime cost or get a lease, and report back to the commission at its May 5 work session.

The cost would be about the same if the county decided to build a new vault to house the growing piles of records, said Wright, but in that case the investment would be lost in a few years when a new judicial complex is built.

The computerized records can be moved to the new complex and used for years to come, he added.

“We felt like this was a pretty good alternative,” Wright told commissioners last week. “It's not a cheap alternative.”

Some of the cost may be recovered, though. With the new hardware and software, the county can sell computer diskettes to real estate companies and lawyers who want to have the information at their fingertips, or set up a subscription service so professionals can query the database from their offices.

Residents who want hard copies of records they look up on the computers will have to pay a small charge, and the county will get about $12,000 a year from the state of Georgia. The state is scanning county records and creating a statewide data base, paying 50 cents for each scan.

Hopes are that in the near future, you won't have to travel to a particular county courthouse to get records of real estate transactions or court cases. The database will be available from any county courthouse, via computer.