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Scanning thousands of color maps and documents for the Texas General Land Office (GLO), Austin, Texas, into an electronic document management system is helping to preserve what historian Eugene C. Barker calls “the most important single collection owned by the state outside the University of Texas.” Many of the documents, which date back as the far as the 1820’s when Texas was still part of Mexico, are deteriorating and are very difficult to read. The GLO, under the leadership of Texas Land Commissioner David Dewhurst, sought a better way to preserve these records while still making them available to the public. After evaluating the performance of a number of imaging firms, the GLO selected Paradigm Imaging Group, Costa Mesa, California, to scan the documents and implement the document management system because, according to Susan Dorsey, Director of Archives and Records, “their scans were incredible.” To date, about 8,000 maps have been scanned and the entire project is expected to be completed in the next year or two. “The new electronic documents provide us with major advantages,” Dorsey said. “We won’t have to handle the originals nearly as much. More than one person can access a document at one time. And, once we put them on the web, the public will be able to access the records 24X7 without coming to our office.”

Historical and practical value

The archives of the Texas GLO have been in existence since just after Texas’s independence from Mexico, making them the oldest collection of original historical records and documents in the state to be continuously maintained by one entity. Consisting of materials dealing mostly with public lands, it is a very specialized collection that documents the settlement and use of Texas lands since the early eighteenth century. By far the majority of the records that constitute the GLO archives are files that establish the passage of title or patent and identify the specific location of each tract of land conveyed from the different governments of Texas. The Texas GLO was established by one of the first acts of the Republic of Texas Congress to determine land ownership after Texas had won independence from Mexico in 1836, making it the oldest agency in state government. The beginning of the archives can be dated to 1837 when the first land commissioner, John P. Borden, was directed to gather the official records of each of the colonies that had operated under the Mexican colonization laws. As the government of Texas created liberal policies throughout the nineteenth century to transfer public lands to private hands, the GLO functioned largely as a county courthouse for all of Texas, registering and monitoring the use of land certificates, recording land surveys, making county maps and issuing patents.

The land grant records at the GLO were important for much of the nineteenth century for establishing the rightful ownership of land and the location of vacant land. As land was subsequently divided, these records continued to be important for establishing the validity of titles and the locations of boundary lines. Given the importance of land in Texas, the records regarding the transfer of public lands to private ownership were deemed of utmost value throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In fact, so important were they in symbolic value that a struggle, dubbed the “Archives War”, was fought between the citizens and the government over their removal from Austin in 1841. Today the GLO records are still considered essential for these same purposes, since early surveys were often inaccurate and many county courthouses have burned. After 1900, an increasing interest in preserving and recording the state’s history led historians to discover the value on the GLO archives. At the same time, increasing interest in genealogy brought individuals to the GLO in search of ancestors.

Searching for a solution

The problem facing the GLO is that these valuable records are slowly deteriorating. The records are used on a daily basis by GLO employees and the public. Each time a document is accessed it must be removed from the archives, copied and replaced, creating a lot of wear and tear. There are special problems with the records from about 1880 to 1930. They were created on paper made with wood pulp that is generating acids that are beginning to dissolve the paper. “Commissioner Dewhurst came into my office one day and said that we needed to do something as soon as possible to preserve these records while keeping them available for daily use,” Dorsey said. “We looked at microfilm and digitization and decided that digitization would provide much superior accessibility. Then, we got to the hard part – finding a vendor that could reproduce these large documents on the computer screen to same level of clarity and color fidelity as the originals while avoiding further damage during the scanning process. We talked to all of the vendors that we were familiar with in the area and evaluated their sample scans. The major problem that they all seemed to have was difficulty in reproducing the very fine and faint linework that appears on many of our maps.”

“Then someone that I knew recommended Paradigm,” Dorsey said. “They sent two people and a scanning and printing system into our office for a one-week test. From the beginning they were able to produce scans that were far superior to what we had seen up to that point. The line definition and color accuracy was superior to what the other vendors were producing. ”Kevin Cutler, Project Manager for Paradigm, attributes the quality of the scans to several factors. “The company is using very high-end 40- and 50-inch scanners and the documents are scanned at 400 dpi into a RGB color format. We tested several large format scanners, and chose Vidar and Contex for the task”. Documents that were extremely fragile and difficult to scan were scanned on a Vidar Atlas Pro scanner, while the Contex scanner handled the rest. Paradigm uses a special process that it has developed to enhance document quality and retain the color integrity. The company’s scanner operators are trained to carefully monitor each scan and make adjustments if necessary to maintain the highest possible quality standards. After scanning, Paradigm technicians thoroughly inspect each image and then the images are attached to the document management system. Commissioner Dewhurst found funding for a pilot project and initiated a competitive bidding process that required that the vendor provide a scanner operator and a project manager at the GLO facility. Paradigm was awarded the bid based both on price and quality. The pilot project was a success and Paradigm was awarded a contract for the current fiscal year to begin full-scale archiving and storage of the documents.

Outstanding imaging quality

“The quality of the scans has been excellent throughout the project,” said Joan Kilpatrick, Map Specialist, for the GLO. “You can zoom in on them on the computer just like you can zoom in the on the originals with a high powered magnifying glass. Each scan is saved on DVD along with thumbnails that are used to simplify the retrieval process.” The images will be accessed through a database that Paradigm is building with their VisualBASE EDM software. VisualBASE is a Windows-based document management solution that allows drawings and documents to be stored in virtual file cabinets so they can be organized in familiar document hierarchies. Visual browse and search capabilities make it easy to find documents and they can be panned, zoomed, marked up and printed from within the same environment. The images are stored on a GLO server and printed through a Paradigm configured controller using high-end image processing software to a 60-inch-wide HP5000 inkjet plotter. Many of the maps require restoration before they are scanned and this process is being partially paid for by a program called Adopt-A-Map in which the GLO accepts tax deductible contributions. The restoration process, which consists of washing the maps and placing them on a new backing, can cost up to $1000 each.

“We are clearly on the path towards making a dramatic improvement in our archiving and retrieval process,” Dorsey concluded. “Once the documents are scanned, we can avoid further handling and place them in an environment that will substantially extend their life. Users of the documents will also be able to access them far more quickly by performing a search on the computer than it was ever possible to retrieve them from a physical file. Once we complete the scanning process, we are planning to make the documents available on the Web which will bring the accessibility of these documents to a new level. While the documents are stored in a fireproof room, the ability to generate backup copies of the documents and store them off site will greatly increase our disaster readiness. Paradigm has done a wonderful job in treating our valuable documents with the utmost care and providing imaging quality that we still find somewhat hard to believe. By the end of this year, we expect to be able to scan about 32,000 documents and complete the job in our next fiscal year. We are very excited about this opportunity to improve service to the public while preserving our heritage.”