Katy Klettlinger became Licking County’s first records center coordinator in November 2008 to store and preserve public records. The position was one of solitude at first but now oversees three other full-time employees: one reference archivist and two imaging technicians. They preserve public records on paper, in electronic form and on microfilm. This interesting topic came from Newark Advocate in their article, “Efforts to preserve records will continue despite exit of archivist.”
With 3,000 cubic feet of county records in sealed boxes in a climate-controlled pole barn behind the Licking County Justice Center, storage is a challenge. The temperature there is kept no higher than 70 degrees; the humidity ranges between 30 and 50 percent, which is critical considering the oldest paper documents stored include deeds from the County Recorder’s Office that date back to 1808.
Klettlinger is leaving this position for a new one with the State Library of Ohio, but leaves it with bright plans for growth. As both an archivist and records manager, she knows the future is in digitization.
It is exciting to see the efforts put into history being preserved for future access and generations. Machine assisted indexing certainly makes the process much faster.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
