Bonneville County moving more than 2 million records to digital

Bonneville County is switching its records system to keep up with the digital times and is working to convert years’ worth of records to make them available online for the public.

More than 2 million records are being switched to a new digital software called Eagle Recorder.

“Our county goes back to 1911, and so we’ve converted the data all over from the beginning time,” Panny Manning, a Bonneville County clerk, said.

The new system will make it easier for the public to submit and view records, like marriage licenses and business permits.

“With the new system now, end users can search all the records from the county from 1911 up until now from their home or from their office. And they will be able to print the documents out on their own printer instead of having to come to the clerk’s office to do that,” Brain Powell, the Bonneville County systems administrator, said.

This system is costing the county a pretty penny, but at no cost to taxpayers.

“Yes, there is a cost associated — minor — but we think it’s well worth it to make sure that the public has access to all these records. It’s a really neat thing we can do,” Manning said.

“The conversion of all of the data in the vault, to be scanned and digitized and be available for the public, was about $170,000. And then the software itself that we’ll be running with the county is about $60,000 a year. And we were very careful in setting that up to where it will be paid for by user fees and not tax dollars,” Powell said.

The county will have every single record available in the new system.

“We have to scan every page, and we made sure that the page is high enough in resolution so it’s legible. We can see any handwritten marks that are on the recorded documents,” Powell said.

After that, the clerks indexed all the information, which creates categories to make it easier to search the system. The system will soon have more than 800,000 records from 1911 to 1996, 1.4 million records from 1996 to 2017 and more than 6,000 records of plats, surveys, and patents.

The county hopes the system will be available to the public on May 1. Before that, the clerk’s office will be closed on April 28, so no documents can be recorded in Bonneville County that day. If you need to get something recorded that day, you can visit other counties.