Tishomingo County sits along the borders of Tennessee and Alabama in the northeastern corner of Mississippi. Its hilly topography more closely resembles the land found across the state line in southern Tennessee. Since its formation in 1836, the Chancery Clerk office in Tishomingo County has built a substantial archive of documents.
As their court and land record collection grew, the county faced the perpetual challenge of providing citizens fast and convenient access to records. To better serve his constituents, Peyton Cummings, Tishomingo Chancery Clerk, turned to Revolution Data Systems to convert his collection of land records to digital files.
“Like a lot of Chancery Clerks in Mississippi, my deeds and deeds of trust books were frequently used as they were the sole source of record for over a centuries’ worth of land transactions. It is critical to ensure the long-term safekeeping of the historical records.”
— Peyton Cummings, Chancery Clerk
Time to move away from books
In 2008, Tishomingo County began electronically managing deeds and deeds of trust records in their County Records Management System (CRMS). This created two silos of land records – one on paper and one digital.
Beginning in 2016, Cummings started a digital initiative to make his most-accessed historical records readily available to staff and constituents. To unite his historical collection of records to those in CRMS, Cummings contracted Revolution Data Systems to begin the process of digitizing his collection.
Working backward to move forward
The project started with Revolution Data Systems setting up high-speed scanners onsite at Tishomingo County. Our document conversion team started at the most recent book from 1998 and scanned all books back to the year 1926.
Each book was prepped for scanning by removing them from their original binders and fixing any damaged or folded pages. Images were then scanned at 300 DPI to ensure the best possible image quality.
Over a decade’s worth of books from the 1960s and 1970s were photostatic images. These images were reversed, de-speckled, and cleaned up during the conversion process.
Indexing land records is key
All books back to the year 1926 were fully indexed to enable researchers to perform a full title search. Revolution Data Systems worked with Tishomingo’s staff to gather a uniform set of indexing rules to make the documents easily retrievable.
Also critical to the success of the project was ensuring the documents were formatted properly for ingestion into Tishomingo’s CRMS document management system. Revolution Data Systems consulted with Three Rivers and Mississippi State University’s NSPARC to create a process to upload all records to the system.
“RDS worked with my office and Three Rivers to ensure my deeds and deeds of trust records were scanned and indexed correctly. Having digital access to my older records makes life better for everyone that walks into our office and prevents wear and tear on the historical books.”
Up next
Over the course of the last few years, our team has worked side-by-side with Mr. Cummings to digitize his collection of land records. Managing land records is just one of many hats that Chancery Clerks in Mississippi wear. They also record the official minutes for the Board of Supervisors; manage the claims docket and payroll; serves as official record manager of the county and clerk of the Chancery Court.
Next, Tishomingo will work systematically to eliminate paper across other departments to reap the benefits of a fully digital record collection.
Have a project in mind? Get in touch by calling 985-888-0091 or filling out the form below.
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