Records Management and Preservation Board (RMPB) Grant

Applications must demonstrate the willingness of the applicant office and the county commission to comply with all grant reporting deadlines and budget, purchasing, and reporting requirements; and to provide internal staff support to ensure the success of the project and the improvement of the management and preservation of the records addressed in the grant.

Eligible Projects:

• Personnel Costs: 
• To conduct inventory of records and remove non-records, duplicates, and accumulations of records that have reached or exceeded required retention periods.
• To scan and index records using the county’s existing records management software. 
• Current employees may be used for hours in excess of regular work hours if devoted totally to work approved in the proposal.
  
• Records Storage and Shelving: 
• To provide for physical storage units and systems for records, such as manually operated mobile track shelving systems, steel shelving, map cabinets and/or Mylar map sleeves, and standard archives records boxes (10”x12”x15”).
• Reformatting: 
• To improve access and preservation of records through digitization, or microfilming of permanent records which exist only in digital format. Counties are required to verify that all digital images are exact duplicates of the original records and are to provide copies of all images in JPEG or TIFF format to the State Archives. The images provided to the State Archives will not be retained beyond the life of the storage device.
• Equipment: 
• To purchase computer terminals and single-function printers for public access use in the records room, and/or scanners for county government employees to use for digitizing long-term and/or permanent records. The scanner must be compatible with the county’s existing records management software. Funding for these projects is contingent on the county’s commitment to provide installation, technology support, upgrades, and maintenance necessary to network the computer(s) and scanner(s) to existing database or software programs. Eligible equipment purchases may also include shredders for the destruction of confidential records that have met their retention requirement.
• Conservation: 
• To restore, mend, encapsulate, rebind or recover original permanent records, record books, or original maps. Counties should consider digitizing the original records during any restoration project, as this sometimes provides the best opportunity to reformat the records to enhance accessibility.