Customer Service Director Wayne Mozo, for one, says he couldn't be happier about this liberation from tedium made possible by a purple device called ScreenScan.

This retrofit scanning screen has turned the division's two microfilm reader printers into digital workstations. ScreenScan simply replaced the screens on Minolta RP 507 roll film and Minolta 605Z jacket/fiche reader/printers to provide on-demand electronic scanning of microfilm images. These are then imported into a PC and faxed out to customers by modem, or printed on a laser printer.

The greatest beneficiaries of the ScreenScan advantage are the citizens of Brevard County who are now supplied with copies of official documents more quickly And in many cases, the documents they receive are enhanced versions of the microfilm copies, making them easier to read.

Problem

The Brevard County Public Records Center responds to requests for copies of official records for the entire county, including most of those received by branch centers in Melbourne and Rockledge. This entails sending about 100 faxes daily, some of which include 25 to 40 pages, making this a cumbersome and paper intensive task.

Most of these are criminal and real estate records requested by attorneys, abstract companies, surveyors, and appraisal firms, as well as individual citizens. "Although we provide information and copies to other departments of the Clerk's office and governmental agencies, our primary function is to serve the citizens of Brevard County," said Mozo.

Copies are kept on microfiche as well as microfilm. Most requests come in by phone from repeat customefs and are faxed out. Some requests are mailed in or made in person, in which cases customers are supplied with printed copies.

Constantly sending so much paper through the fax machine meant the inevitable problems of pages not received by the customer or other reception problems. And if pages needed to be resent, tracking down those documents was often a chore. "We were always fumbling through stacks of paper to pull documents when they had to be re-faxed," said Mozo. In some cases, the old microfilmed copies were of such poor quality that parts of documents were difficult to read, especially over a fax machine.

Solution

"We needed a way to improve service but found that the cost of converting our existing microfilm images to optical disk was prohibitive under current budgetary constraints. We looked at a number of hybrid systems and chose ScreenScan because it offered all the features we needed at a price that was very competitive." Mozo said ScreenScan allowed his division to distribute images electronically at a fraction of the cost of other hybrid systems sold as a total unit.

And ScreenScan's proprietary software provides an extensive menu of options heavily used by the division. "The enhancements available through the software allow us to enlarge, crop or mask images. We also have settings for particularly grainy or poor microfilm image and retrieve those settings as needed," noted Mozo. "Some of the older microfilm is pretty bad."

The system scans at 400 dpi with 256 levels of gray per pixel. Built into the high-resolution scanning screen is a image enhancement processor which improves document quality.

Software options also provide the ability to conceal confidential information on records through masking, a process often used on criminal records being faxed. Enlarging specific parts of a document is another function commonly used on real estate records.

This feature is particularly useful when supplying copies of deeds and other documents containing detailed legal descriptions of property, according to Mozo. With ScreenScan, the quality of the image can be improved and information such as the legal description can be blown up for easy readability.

Another option enables the operator to create a text note, certifying that the document is a true and correct portion. This saves a lot of rubber-stamping, says Mozo.

A considerable amount of time is also saved by the convenience of a fax phone book where names and numbers of heavy requesters, such as tide companies or attorneys, are listed in the PC for easy reference and automatic access.

As an added bonus, Mozo said ScreenScan eliminates maintenance cost on microfilm printers. "The beauty of ScreenScan is it doesn't require a machine to have a printer. It can sit on an old reader and the machine just runs and runs," he said.

Since ScreenScan has helped streamline the division's workflow, only two reader printers are needed to accomplish what it used to take three to do. Relocating the extra reader/printer to allow abstractors in Titusville to make their own copies as needed has helped de-centralize records services and lighten the workload in the Customer Service Division.

Further decentralization of services occurred when a reader/printer was recently installed in the Melbourne branch office to provide service to local customers. Mozo said eventually that machine may be outfitted with ScreenScan. In the meantime, he is planning to order another one for use by his division. "ScreenScan speeds up delivery of our services and enables us to do more work. It's a really neat product that's priced very competitively.

[BACK]