Auto-Indexing and Redaction – Increasing the Accuracy and Access of the Public Records

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

The Orange County Clerk-Recorder Department serves the third largest county in the State of California and the sixth most populous county in the country - serving a population of more than three million residents. The department processes a considerable amount of real property records. To make them available to the public within its 48-hour target time, not only did the department have to index and make the documents available to the public, the department also had the mandated responsibility of redacting sensitive information from the records prior to making them available to the public. Prior to the implementation of auto-indexing and redaction technology, the department relied on very time consuming manual in-house indexing which had its limitations and was prone to inconsistencies and human error. The department also outsourced redaction responsibilities to an outside vendor. This two-step process delayed public access to the records for several days. In 2016, the department recorded over 660,000 real property documents. With the implementation of auto-indexing and redaction technology, the department found a solution that integrated with its current platforms giving it the capacity to handle the more than the 660,000 documents it processed during FY 2016. The new technology also allowed the department to make documents available to the public 48 hours after being accepted for recording, eliminated the need to use an outside vendor to redact sensitive information from the documents, increased the accuracy of the documents by eliminating the manual entry of information and freed human resources, formerly used for manual indexing tasks, allowing the department to deploy staff to address surges in demand throughout the department as needed.