 
 The
Lancaster County Assessment Office appraises real estate
within Lancaster County, one of the most historic and
unique counties in the U.S., for the local property tax
levy. County government, 17 school districts and most of
the 60 municipalities in the County levy a property tax.
For most, the property tax is their principal source of
revenue. The Assessment Office maintains a listing and
valuation inventory of the nearly 185,000 parcels
located within the border of the County for this
purpose.
Associated with these
parcels were over 50 four and five-drawer file cabinets
full of workcards. The department needed a better, more
cost-effective way to store and access this vital
information for their own use and that of their external
customers. After weighing their options, it was decided
that the best and most cost-effective option was to scan
them and retrieve the images via their EMC ApplicationXtender/WebXtender imaging system. Image
quality and index accuracy were the highest priorities
in this project.
  "Reynolds scanned our
workcards which contained 1.9
million
pages of 8½ x 11  documents, hand
drawn sketches,
blueprints, faded electrostatic copies,
tracing paper, and
photos and created a routine to seamlessly import the
images into our
imaging system. The image quality is so good that they're almost
better digitally than on hard copy. You can see every
little pencil stroke. The images are indexed properly
and in order so that all the iterations of a parcel are
together. We were very impressed with that. This saves a
great deal of time that used to be spent hunting through
Grantee books and going through the file
cabinets to
find all the different iteration of a parcel which
could
not be filed together on paper. The import process
was a
piece of cake for our IT Department."
The space that was once
occupied by the file cabinets is now productive office
space and flat-screen terminals are available for
viewing the scanned images in both the Assessment and
Records of Deeds Offices. Since scanning completion,
10,000 new parcels have been added. The system
adequately imports any new property deeds, workcards,
letters, subdivision plans, and the like. It's become an
important source for County users and external
customers. The next step is to roll the images out onto
the web via their EMC WebXtender system for viewing
24/7, anywhere in the world.
Reynolds was able to provide
the Lancaster County Assessment
Office with exceptional
quality scanned images from a variety
of papers that
were very challenging to scan, an accurate
index
by which to retrieve any image in seconds , and a
seamless way for their IT Department to get those images
into
their system for efficient use, all at a cost lower
than the ten
other vendors that bid on this project.
Lancaster County, PA
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