Barnstable County is in the process of digitizing 3.25 million pages of county records, including financial audits, meeting minutes, budget documents, and more. The county is using $1.15 million dollars in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to undertake this project.
Assistant county administrator Vaira Harik told County Commissioners at their meeting Wednesday that the county is still waiting on bids from contractors to see just how many of those documents can be digitized with the ARPA money.
"We don't have the information yet to anticipate how far that $1.148 million is going to go,” she said. “The incoming bids are going to help us understand the total spend that's going to be necessary for a first pass at 3.25 million documents."
The county will receive those bids by the end of next week. Then, the county will have to figure out which documents should be digitized first.
“There's going to need to be a prioritization of what is scanned under ARPA, which our digitization team is prepared to discuss,” Harik said.
Many of the documents to be digitized date back to the 1700s and 1800s, according to a press release from the county. Documents that can be made public will eventually be available online.
“The digitization is going to have tags and whatnot in them that will allow them to be searchable and, as appropriate, be available for public viewing,” Harik said.
The county will have a contract ready for the County Commissioners to approve by the end of September. This ARPA money must be used by the end of 2026.
