$300,000 to digitize more court records

TEXARKANA — Miller County Circuit Clerk Mary Pankey plans to spend $300,000 converting 75 file cabinets of criminal, civil and domestic court records into digital electronic copies for the public.

Pankey told Miller County Quorum Court members last week that she intends to pay for the scanning and digitizing of these records with money from her office’s recorder budget, which presently has a $592,000 cash balance.

“Our office went paperless in 2016,” she said. “So all current records are electronically available to the public. So far, we’ve been working to get our older deeds, mortgages and court records scanned and digitized. At this time, most of our historical deeds have been completed and are now electronically available to the public.”

Pankey added that the scanning project will now focus on digitizing criminal records, starting from 1998 to the present.

“We will also start scanning and digitizing our civil and domestic court records, starting from 1987 through to now,” she said.

Pankey also told the justices of the peace that the Duncan Oklahomabased Sutterfield Technology firm, will be conducting the scanning and digitizing process — a project that will take about six to eight weeks to complete.

She added that the project will be conducted in two phases — the first costing about $200,000, the second costing about $100,000.

Following her presentation, the court granted Pankey permission to move forward with document preservation project — a project the JPs plan to officially approve next month.