The Urbana Municipal Documents Center

The Urbana Municipal Documents Center is a municipal records management agency operated by The Urbana Free Library on behalf of the City of Urbana. Center staff organize, microfilm and computer index a wide variety of city documents and records. Founded with the help of an LSCA grant in 1978-80, the Center has been funded by the city since that time. By spring 1998, the Center had converted 600,000 pages of documents to jacketed film and assigned 325,000 index terms.

History

The Urbana Municipal Documents Center began during the period from 1977 through 1980. The initial design of the Center was developed by Frederick Schlipf, Urbana Free Library executive director. The City of Urbana had requested assistance in dealing with problems of storage, distribution and subject access to city documents. Schlipf had taught courses in government publications at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and he drew up a general model for a system of document organization based on his experience as a professor.

The design envisioned called for a project jointly operated by the city and the library. Since no similar centers were available to replicate and the city did not have enough money to fund the necessary research and development, the library applied to the Illinois State Library for a Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA) grant to establish a model municipal documents and records agency. The grant began March 1, 1979, and ended Feb. 28, 1981.

During the first two years, the Center operated almost entirely with funds obtained from the grant. The first year was devoted to research and development. During that time staff surveyed the city's documents and records, developed series structures, worked out a standard numbering scheme for documents, developed a thesaurus, devised methods of indexing by geographic area, prepared the necessary computer software, selected a micrographics system and evaluated and ordered equipment.

Document handling in Urbana in the early 1980's was probably typical of that in many small and medium-sized cities around the country. Urbana is a university town of 36,000 in central Illinois, and with its twin community of Champaign forms the core of an urbanized area of more than 100,000. Like many towns its size, Urbana is large enough to have a complex city government but not large enough to afford a wide range of highly specialized employees. The city was producing documents in a variety of physical formats, some with and some without effective numbering (for example, at the time the project began, Urbana's document numbers repeated every century, a local idiosyncrasy similar to the current year-2000 problem in many computer databases). Files of documents dates back as far as the 1850's, Some documents were found in several locations, while others were missing entirely. Storage of bulky and inactive files was a growing problem. Subject retrieval was based on minimal contents listings for some series, subject arrangement for others, and the excellent memories and dedicated searching of key city staff.

For its part. The Urbana Free Library maintained a small vertical file collection of basic city documents such as council minutes, city codes, and miscellaneous reports, but its efforts were limited. The library could not justify indexing on its own and had made no attempt to develop a comprehensive collection.

General Project Principles

The Urbana Municipal Documents Center's basic design and operational procedures were based on a group of assumptions about municipal documents and records and the proper way to control them. These include:

City/Library Cooperation: Key to the operation of the Center is its cooperative nature. By combining the skills of city and library staff, the Center has developed a stronger and more professionally solid document management program than either group could do separately. The library has gained a more in-depth collection of city documents and the indexing with which to access them. Another benefit of joint management is the way in which it helps city and library staff

* Frederick A. Schlipf, Executive Director, The Urbana Free Library; Jean E. Koch, Director, The Urbana Free Library's Special Collections Department, which includes the Urbana Municipal Documents Center; Dian Strutz, Microfilm Technician, Urbana Municipal Documents Center.

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understand and appreciate each other's functions and skills. The result of such cooperation strengthens both institutions and leads to better mutual understanding.

Establishment of an integrated system: City documents are organized, microfilmed and indexed. It is necessary to do all three of these aspects of document control to ensure future accessibility to the information.

Organization by provenance: Organization of city documents is on the basis of the issuing agency. Most cities already use this method for most of their important documents, since the agencies that issue the documents maintain their own files of these documents. Files that have no assigned number are organized chronologically or sequentially before microfilming.

Conversion to structured series: The establishment of clearly structured series' of documents is critical to effective control. Each series is assigned a title and numbered. The existing numbering system used by City staff is used, if possible.

Micrographics: Microfilming city documents guarantees that the filmed records will not be removed, misplaced or lost. Also, documents in microform can easily be duplicated. Of course, microfilms have the advantage of compact storage. Also, if the film meets state record-retention laws, many of the originals may be discarded.

Indexing rather than cataloging: Effective control of documents requires that each individual record within a series is indexed, rather than giving the series a single bibliographic entry, as in a cataloged monograph. There is no limit to the number of index terms that can be assigned. Where series' do not exist, they are created similar to the federal "Serial Set."

Organization

The operations of the Documents Center can be divided into three basic activities: organization, micrographics and indexing. None of these three activities can be planned or developed without careful consideration of the other two.

The first step in organizing the city's documents required working closely with city staff to locate documents, estimate numbers of documents, decide the order in which documents should be processed and establish a clear and unambiguous series structure.

Every document is assigned to an agency and a series. The agency is the city department or the city commission that produced the document. Some documents fall naturally into series by the manner in which city records are kept. For example, ordinances, resolutions and council minutes already have a series grouping. For other documents, however, series structure must be imposed. A "reports" series provides a good example of a series created to handle an important but scattered mass of documents.

After the series is established, it is equally important to establish strong organization within the series to make sure each document has a unique identifying number.

Micrographics

All documents are filmed on 16mm or 35mm microfilm and converted to microfiche by inserting strips of film into multi-channel Mylar jackets. Microfiche offers several advantages over roll film. Fiche can handle original documents in a variety of sizes, in-house duplication of individual fiche is easy and inexpensive, access to images on fiche is quicker and more direct than cranking through microfilm, and fiche readers are inexpensive. Microfiche also can be updated easily by adding or deleting pages in the microfilm jackets.

When we designed the micrographics process, one of our central aims was to create photographic records that met the requirements of the Local Records Act and would, therefore, allow the city to dispose of original documents. From the outset we have created two copies of each film. Originally, one copy was sent to Springfield to the State Archives as a security roll, while the second copy was used to produce the microfilm jacket. We still follow this pattern today, although the security roll is now stored in a local bank vault because the State Archives no longer has storage space.

Indexing

One reason for the success of the Documents Center is its comprehensive index. From the beginning, we have indexed documents by subjects, names, titles and citation numbers. At the time we began the Center, we could find no full thesaurus for municipal records anywhere in the United States, and one of the major projects we undertook in the LSCA-funded portion of the Center was the development of the necessary controlled vocabulary.

While the rest of the Documents Center has remained relatively stable, our online index has changed frequently, reflecting changes in the computer industry over the past 20 years.

When the Center began, storing the full index online would have been too expensive, and offices in the city and library did not have microcomputers that could have accessed the index. Consequently, our original approach involved creating an online index stored at the computer center of a local bank. At intervals of a year of two, we created a cumulative index on computer output microfiche (COM), which was distributed to all city and library departments. Once the index had

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been created, all our index data up to that time was stored offline on tape. After each edition of the COM index, we began a new online index. When the time came for the next COM index, we merged our online information with the information on tape, produced a new comprehensive COM index, and then stored everything offline. Consequently, the only indexing we maintained online was the material added since we generated the last COM indexes.

The COM index consisted of three indexes and a shelflist. The "Documents List" was a shelflist in serial order of all documents and all subject terms assigned to them. The "Alphabetical Index" contained all entries that could be interfiled alphabetically, included subject terms, personal names, corporate names and geographic names. The "Geographic Section Index" listed all documents that pertained to a specific area of town. To develop entries for this part of the index, the city was divided into 40-acre areas. In surveying terms, each area was a quarter-quarter section. The "Citation Index" was a typical citation index, indexing other documents cited in the document being indexed.

Nearly 20 years of development in personal computers has completely changed our approach to indexing. Our index that was once too large to keep online on a major bank computer center can now be tucked into a small corner of a desktop's hard drive. We produced our last COM index in 1991. Today, the index is produced on a personal computer in the Documents Center office. When we began online indexing in 1980, we had to create our own Cobol indexing software, but now we use standard database software (a customized version of FoxPro) that has reduced the bulk of our index by half. At frequent intervals, we take the most recent version of the index to city offices and load it onto staff computers.

Publicizing the Center

When it became clear to the city and library staff the Documents Center was a success, we worked to share our methods with other municipalities and libraries. We published a technical article in Government Publications Review in 1982(2.) and a general one in Library Journal in 1985(3.). In 1986 we created a poster session that we presented at the ALA and ILA conferences. Frederick Schlipf gave several talks at professional conferences. In 1987, with the help of a second LSCA grant, we published the Urbana Municipal Documents Center Manual{4.]. The Manual appears to be the first major how-to-do-it publication on municipal document control. Finally, a brief article in Illinois Libraries in 1989 summarized the first 10 years of the Center's operations(5.).

Despite our publications and presentations, to the best of our knowledge we have not convinced other public libraries to create cooperative arrangements of this type with their municipalities. Because we have found the project to be very worthwhile and relatively inexpensive, this is disappointing. The Manual received several reviews in national library and municipal government publications, and as part of the grant we provided copies free to all larger Illinois public libraries, but virtually all the sales since that time, both in Illinois and nationwide, have been to municipal and county governments rather than to public libraries.

We think there are several reasons why other public libraries in Illinois and nationwide have not chosen to start projects of this type. First, there has been an increasing conversion of public libraries from municipal libraries to district libraries, which may be reducing the level of interaction between libraries and city governments. Second, document-control systems are complex and require long-term commitment. And finally, despite their importance, municipal records have never been a glamorous or trendy topic in the public library world.

Current Status of the Center

The Center's total statistics accumulate steadily. As of March 1998 we had indexed 50,000 documents, shot 600,000 frames of microfilm, created 21,000 fiche by jacketing film, made 65,000 fiche duplicates of jacketed film, created 5,500 cross references and assigned 325,000 index terms.

We film and index records for 16 agencies, including all city departments and several city commissions. Within these agencies there are more than 100 different documents series, which vary greatly in terms of number of pages per document, size of pages and total number of documents in the series.

Although our intellectual vision of indexing has remained fairly constant, our methods have changed radically. For the first decade, our indexer worked from paper printouts, first writing out document numbers and code numbers for index terms, and then key-boarding these into the computer. Today, the indexer works directly at the computer. Index terms are called up on the screen from tables and added directly by the click of a computer mouse. New terms are added to the tables as needed.

As we have from the beginning, we set no limits on the number of terms that can be assigned to a single document, which can have anywhere from one to hundreds of index terms.

In addition to indexing the actual content of the document, our indexer frequently goes a step further,

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providing a sort of "value-added indexing." This is important because documents frequently lack the reference numbers or terms by which people search the index. For example, the Center's indexer frequently adds street addresses to locations that are cited informally, adds permanent parcel numbers in addition to street addresses, or adds modern index terms to old documents.

One reason the Documents Center has been successful is that it requires minimum attention of city departmental staff. When we begin dealing with a new set of documents, we meet briefly with city staff to determine processing priorities, the nature of the documents involved and specific retrieval needs. After that, the Center staff take total responsibility for the series. The Center's microfilm technician removes materials from city offices for microfilming and returns them after filming. The filmed documents are delivered and filed as duplicate microfiche.

Organizationally, the Documents Center is part of the library's Special Collections Department, which also includes the Champaign County Historical Archives, our collection of local history and genealogy materials. The same librarians work in both the Documents Center and the Archives, and they find that knowledge developed in one area frequently assists in the other.

The Center has had the advantage of continuity of its professional staff. Of the current staff, the two librarians, Jean Koch and Howard Gruenberg, have been with the Center since 1981, and our microfilm technician, Dian Strutz, has worked at the Center since 1988. These three positions are equivalent to about 1.5 FTE. Frederick Schlipf, who developed the first design for the Center in 1978, is still director of the library.

Future Developments: Imaging

One of the major issues facing the Documents Center is how to handle document imaging. Two concerns are involved here. One is how document images will be made most easily available to city and library offices, and the other is how the Center will continue to provide archival preservation of images.

We anticipate that digital image delivery will be fairly straightforward. When the city LAN is ready and its central computer large enough to store digital images, there are straightforward techniques for transferring scanned images of existing fiche and documents to the city, as well as for making these available to citizens through the city's and library's Web sites.

Preservation may become an issue because vendors of imaging systems tend to create enthusiasm by exaggerating the archival reliability of their systems. Although Illinois law permits the Local Records Commission to set "standards for the reproduction of... public records by photography, microphotographic processes or digitized electronic format(6.)," the Commission has not yet authorized the use of digital records. A very substantial literature indicates that digital images cannot be safely regarded as archival, and the Urbana Library and Documents Center staff continue to view microfilm as a far safer and more secure method of long-term preservation.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is facing this same challenge. Imaging and the Internet have provided new ways to open access to records, but deciding which records to convert and how to manage them are serious concerns. Technology sometimes moves forward so rapidly that some records kept in older digital formats have become electronically inaccessible in the future and lost to history. NARA accepted its first digital record in the late 1960s. Today it has about 22,000 unique files from the various federal agencies. All the data is stored in digital format on 3480 tape cartridges. When a file is acquired it must be in a software and hardware-independent format. That means the data is stored in uncompressed, flat files. For example, information received in the late '60s and early '70s was on punch cards. These data were copied onto 8 track magnetic tapes. Every 10 years, the data are recopied, using the most current and neutral media that exists. In the future what is now on magnetic tapes may be copied to optical disk storage, or whatever else happens to be current(7.).

The Documents Center will continue to convert paper files to a more compact format. There are many exciting possibilities for utilizing electronic formats to make information more accessible to the public, especially as the cost of electronic storage decreases and the speed of computers increases. However, the mere availability of a newer, faster technology does not alone justify its acquisition. This technology can be of value only if it increases storage efficiency while maintaining permanence.

Future Developments: Indexing

A second area of concern is possible changes in the Center's approach to indexing. We have placed a high priority on making the Center's necessarily complex index more user friendly. At the same time, we have had to defend our approach to indexing because commercial software firms now offer automatic "indexing" software.

User-friendly indexing is important to us because we would like to make our documents index (and eventually documents images) available through the city and library Web sites. Before we can do so, however,

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we need to find ways to lead very inexperienced users through the structure of our index, and we will probably need to provide explanation of the basic nature of city documents as well. At this time we are not sure it's possible to carry out fully successful searches of municipal records without a fairly sophisticated understanding of how such records function, but we hope to make progress in this direction in the next couple of years.

The second issue has arisen because computers can create "indexes" automatically by reading every word of every document in a database and creating an inverted index of words and their locations in the database. End-users can search the database using any words they want.

Such full-text searches make it easy to locate documents when users are not exactly sure what they need, but for a number or reasons they cannot serve as the only form of access to a database of this type. First, full-text searches find a very high number of irrelevant items(8.). This would be a particular problem with an intensive collection on a narrow subject area, such as Urbana's municipal documents, where the same words appear in a high percentage of documents. In addition, full-text searches cannot find words that do not exist in the document in question but would have been added by an experienced indexer. Finally, many municipal documents consist of the work of city councils and committees and similar groups that may consider several unrelated matters at every meeting; postcoordinate Boolian searching of such records can lead to the retrieval of vast numbers of irrelevant documents through the coordination of unconnected terms. For all these reasons, we are convinced full-text searching alone would be unworkable.

In the last analysis, although automatic indexing can be helpful, successful document retrieval depends on accurate and consistent indexing by staff who understand the contents and context of the documents.

Conclusion

Because the Documents Center devoted most of a year to research and development before starting to film and index documents, many problems were solved in advance. There have been relatively few occasions when a decision made in 1979 has had to be changed.

We are further from the cutting edge of technology than we were when we began nearly 20 years ago. Our computer index, which once strained the capability of a major bank computer center, now seems of trivial size. And our photographic images are workable rather than glamorous. But virtually everything we have done can be translated into a higher-tech environment when the time comes. If we decide to provide online imaging, equipment exists to scan our existing microfiche. If digital imaging ever becomes archivally acceptable, conversion will be equally straightforward. And our online index is extensively tagged; it has been reformatted in the past and can easily be reformatted again.

Although things will obviously change, to date we have not seen any technical developments that would improve quality at a reasonable price, or cut our current costs.

As we look back over the past 19 years it is satisfying to know that the original LSCA grant served its purpose. Long after federal funding ran out, the Urbana Municipal Documents Center is supported by city taxes and still doing its job.

Notes

1. A few paragraphs of this article have been transcribed nearly verbatim from earlier publications on the Documents Center. Because Frederick Schlipfwas the author or co-author of all of these publications, we have not felt that intellectual honesty requires the complexity of elaborate quotation marks and page citations to these earlier publications.

2. Jeanne Owen Brown and Frederick A. Schlipf, "The Use of Microfiche and COM Indexes to Improve Municipal Documents Control," Government Publications Review (July-August 1982), 9 (no.4):289-310.

3. Frederick A. Schlipf and Jeanne Owen Brown, "The Urbana Municipal Documents Project," Library Journal (March 1, 1985), 110 (no.4):51-56.

4. Jeanne E. Koch, Howard C. Grueneberg, Jr., and Frederick A. Schlipf, The Urbana Municipal Documents Center Manual (Urbana, IL: The Urbana Free Library, 1987), 7-10.

5. Frederick A. Schlipf, "The Urbana Municipal Documents Center: Ten Years of Development," Illinois Libraries (November 1989):452-456.

6. 50 ILCS 205/7.

7. Tod Newcombe, "The New NARA — Broadening Record Access in Changing Times," Inform (June 1996):9-10.

8. Susan L. Cisco and Janelle Wertzberger, "Indexing Digital Documents," Inform (February 1997):12.

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