It was a mountain-sized problem that required an equal-sized solution.
The mountain was paperwork — thousands and thousands of documents dating back to 1953.
And the problem for the Lake County Water Authority was keeping those papers at bay while retaining the critical documents as required by state law.
The solution came in the form of a copier, a computer program and some handiwork.
For the folks at the water authority — a government agency with the goal of conserving and controlling the fresh water around the county — the solution came just in time. They were bursting at the seams with paperwork of all forms, wondering how it was all going to be stored.
It was the water authority's leap into the 21st century and the agency's chance to save precious historical documents.
"We saw the need. We were running out of space," said Ben Garcia, the water authority's geographic information system manager.
The problem for the water authority has been building through the years. Inside a 20-by-30-foot room at water authority offices in Tavares are documents by the thousands — maps, surveys, meeting agendas, just to name a few.
If a water authority employee needed to access one of these documents, it typically took a while to find what's needed. Although the information is categorized and cataloged, finding a specific document or piece of information out of thousand of pages was challenging, to say the least.
According to state statute, most of the documents produced by the water authority, like other state governmental agencies, must be saved. There are specific time frames for different types of documents. For example, surveys and maps need to be kept forever, while meeting agendas must be saved for five years.
With the documents mounting in the storage room, water-authority officials knew they needed to do something. The solution came from Ricoh, which makes, among other things, copiers, and DocuLex Archive Studio, which made the archival software.
'Huge requirement'
The hardware was used to scan in the documents, while the software categorizes the information, among other things.
Joyce Ouellette, Ricoh's director for solution product marketing, said more and more agencies, both public and private, are moving toward solutions such as those provided to the water authority.
It's a way to safeguard important information in a fast and easy way.
Mike Perry, the water authority's executive director, said one of the biggest challenges to solving the mounting paper problem was money.
"While we had this huge requirement for retention, we also couldn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on software and hardware," Perry said. "We expected sticker shock. It turns out you can get everything you need out of one box."
In the end, the software cost about $19,000 and the copier cost about $5,000, Perry said.
The Ricoh machine also replaced the water authority's aging copier, scanner and fax machine. It can do all those chores.
Tools in place
Now that the tools are in place, water authority workers have been scrambling to get the documents into the new computer system.
Perry said he doesn't expect that 50 years of documents will get put into this program. Some of them will get put onto a computer disk for reference.
Already, workers are seeing improvements with document retrieval. Instead of flipping through pages and pages of documents, the information is just a keystroke away.
It also keeps the water authority from having to deal with what could have been a disaster.
"If we were to have a fire and all those paper documents were to get destroyed," Perry said, "there was no way to recover that."
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