City Hall Wont be Hoarders Much Longer
Robert Thomas
If you are looking for a 1950's Saskatchewan Roughrider's schedule, it might just be in the basement of Moose Jaw City Hall.
During budget discussions, Council discussed, at length, the state of the historical records retained by the City Clerk\Solicitor department which are currently stored in the basement of City Hall.
Council was shown slides of a large number of boxes piled in the basement as City Clerk\Solicitor, Myron Gulka-Tiechko, spoke about a department initiative to clean up the physical mess of historical documents which have been accumulating for decades.
The lack of rapid and easy access to documents is problematic, he said.
"There is a lack of access which needs to be addressed in a major way," Gulka-Tiechko said.
He spoke about the need to physically sift through and digitize the records which must be kept and to decide what could safely be destroyed.
The quip about the old Roughrider's schedule announcement came when Gulka-Tiechko was speaking about hunting for a document, a staff member had found the old schedule while searching for something else.
The need to eliminate, and not digitize all records, was stressed, as much of the paper records are simply unnecessary. Gulka-Tiechko described locating things using a "needle in a haystack" approach, with so many paper records to sift through to find some records.
The City would also need to contact the Provincial Archives Department, to find out which paper records needed to be kept and which ones could be disposed of.
The cost of digititizing paper records is $80,000 and would take two years to complete. It is a job which must be done manually, with document scanning.
The need to eliminate unnecessary electronic records was discussed.
The City holds 1,000,000 records, presently, and the City Clerk's office alone has 100,000 records and would like to get that number down to 6,000.
New records for the last few years have been digitized, eliminating the need to do the time consuming task in the future.