The Marion County Board of Supervisors approved a new digital system for a cost of around $39,000 from a company called ArcaSearch out of St. Paul, Minnesota.

The company will work at digitizing some old historic records for the board of supervisors and their minutes. David Frank, leader for the company, was at the meeting and made a demonstration.

According to Dani Graves, Deputy Marion County Auditor, “Any record that he photos and digitizes that is in a typed format could be searchable. So for instance if our secondary roads department comes in and they want to know our road vacation that they did some time ago and they know that it happened and they know the name of the road but they just can’t remember when it was. We would be able to go on to ArcaSearch and type in the name of the road and it would pull up any document that found that word within it just momentarily.”

Graves said there are 24 books that go back to the 1800s to be photographed for the project and Franklin feels he and two or three others can get the job done in two to three weeks. Currently lookups are page by page until located.