When

you visit the Superior Court clerk's office to

look up information on court cases or real estate

deeds, you'll soon sit down at a computer

terminal instead of digging through massive

record books.

The

clerk's office and the secured vaults where the

records are kept are filled to capacity, said Jay

Wright, county director of information systems.

But a new, more efficient filing system designed

to save space will make the records difficult to

get at for as many as 20 people at one time

researching court records, he added.

After

studying the records system recently, Wright

said, "The situation was a lot worse than I

ever anticipated it would be."

Price

tag for scanning the records and making them

available on computer terminals, plus the new

filing system and construction cost to rearrange

the clerk's office comes to $204,000, or the

county can pay $7,059 a month to lease the

scanning and computer equipment.

County

commissioners last week decided to ask finance

director Emory McHugh to analyze the question of

whether to pay the onetime cost or get a lease,

and report back to the commission at its May 5

work session.

The

cost would be about the same if the county

decided to build a new vault to house the growing

piles of records, said Wright, but in that case

the investment would be lost in a few years when

a new judicial complex is built.

The

computerized records can be moved to the new

complex and used for years to come, he added.

"We

felt like this was a pretty good

alternative," Wright told commissioners last

week. "It's not a cheap alternative."

Some

of the cost may be recovered, though. With the

new hardware and software, the county can sell

computer diskettes to real estate companies and

lawyers who want to have the information at their

fingertips, or set up a subscription service so

professionals can query the database from their

offices.

Residents

who want hard copies of records they look up on

the computers will have to pay a small charge,

and the county will get about $12,000 a year from

the state of Georgia. The state is scanning

county records and creating a statewide data

base, paying 50 cents for each scan.

Hopes

are that in the near future, you won't have to

travel to a particular county courthouse to get

records of real estate transactions or court

cases. The database will be available from any

county courthouse, via computer.

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