BELLEFONTE — Within the 366 large bound tomes in Centre County’s prothonotary and clerk of courts office are records dating back to 1800.
In those records is information about everything that’s happened in Centre County courtrooms, and filings, up to 1994, when records started to be digitally produced. They include information on mineral, oil and gas rights, property line disputes, divorces and charters. It’s a wealth of information used by historians, surveyors, lawyers and genealogists.
The books also contain the judgments of civil cases and sentencings in criminal cases, from felonies to summaries, all the way back to the first days of the county.
On Tuesday, Centre County commissioners will consider a contract with RBA Professional Data Systems Inc. to provide document imaging services for all of those massive tomes. The first phase of the contract is for $61,425, with the total contract coming in at $242,433.
This will allow the dockets in the books to be viewed by the wider public on Webia, the county’s online database, without having to go and search through the books themselves. RBA also will index each book for easier searching.
The docket books themselves are a kind of index, said Debra C. Immel, prothonotary and clerk of the courts. They refer to the actual court documents that are kept in the county’s records facility in the Willowbank building. These kinds of documents are considered permanent records and can’t be destroyed, Immel said. There’s so much of it, her office simply can’t keep anything longer than a few years.
She said she would also like to digitize the full spread of court documents in the future if funding is available.
The digitizing of the docket books should take about six months, according to Immel.
“It’s a way to improve public access,” she said, of the important historical information.
Most of the books are massive bound tomes that contain on average 500 pages each. The later books are not bound, and are therefore more easily digitized. They’re housed in a small rectangular space in Immel’s office. Some of the books are marked with a red dot to signify they’ve already been digitized.
The bound books themselves also are showing their age. The bindings and covers are coming off of some from frequent use.
Inside, unsurprisingly, most of the information is handwritten. Typewriters weren’t commercially produced until the 1870s.
Immel said RBA promised to make them just as legible as if a person was looking at the original physical copy.
