File Storage Goes Green

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

Many county governments have launched initiatives which recognize that prosperity and economic development cannot be achieved at the expense of theenvironment. In 2007, the Board of Supervisors launched their Green County San Bernardino program to spur the use of “green” technologies. In an effort to support this direction San Bernardino County Information Services Department Application Development Division took a look at the 800,000 sheets of paper a month to determine if they could reduce the amount of hard copy documents being generated. While some documents had to be in a hard copy format ISD discovered that a good percentage of the hard copy paper documents could be converted into a searchable PDF format. This would not only save paper, but also printer toner, print charges, and cost for printer maintenance. In addition it would save labor by not having to box and store these documents. The search user at the Assessor’s simply launched their browser and started the new in-house search application, entered the search criteria (e.g. parcel number), and the document was retrieved from the NAS storage and the PDF displayed on the screen. Once retrieved the document could be reviewed, and if needed, printed out. Most of the time the document simply needed to be referenced to answer a customer question and no hard copy was required. Since the county started this effort about 18 months ago they have eliminated about 85,000 sheets per month or 1,020,000 sheets annually. This resulted in a savings of paper, printer supplies, and boxes to hold the reports, storage needed to hold the boxes, and resources that have to handle and distribute and retrieve these hard copy documents.