Goodbye Paper, and Good Riddance

From the New Castle County Clerk of the Peace office comes the news that they will be getting rid of paper records.

It's great news. Remove the 400,000 thousand index cards, the 100 plus dusty old binders and books, and the hundreds of microfilm reels. Their day is done.

The Clerk of the Peace office keeps track of marriage licenses, and while they do a pretty good job of it, relying on the older media can mean that looking up older records can be a time consuming task. And all that paper takes up a lot of space.

When you hear that it will take about 30 DVDs to replace all of their paper records, you get a little idea of how much of an improvement that is. When you find out that it will take seconds to find records, even the older ones, the impact really hits home. Especially when some older records would take days and weeks to locate.

Certified copies of marraige licenses are needed for divorces, for estate law cases, for genealogical searches, and for other instances where that record may be important. This change will make the work of finding those records much easier for the Clerk's Office, and the decreased waiting time will be a boon for the people who need the records.