www.njarchives.org/links/parispress05.html -
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Published on: 7/6/2005
Last Visited: 4/30/2007
There was no organization, everybody just took the records downstairs and put them in this room and just left them," said City Clerk Jane Williams-Warren, who began working for the city in the 1960s.
Some departments would stick their files in any space they could find in closets, balconies and attics.
Now, with the help of a grant from the state, Williams-Warren hopes to be able to put all of the city's paper trail into a digital format, and keep it in one central location.
The state Division of Archives and Records Management, a part of the Department of State, recently gave Paterson a $50,000 grant through its Public Archives and Records Infrastructure Support program.The money will help Williams-Warren, as the city's custodian of records, to assess the city's needs and create a strategic plan to manage its records.
The division gave a similar grant of $48,340 to Clifton.Passaic County received $1.4 million for eight projects to scan and store public records.
Williams-Warren, who also serves as the president of the Municipal Clerks Association of New Jersey, said the PARIS program will go a long way toward preserving records that would otherwise be susceptible to age and accidents.The program also signals a renewed emphasis on preserving government documents for the public and for historical purposes.Until about a decade ago, city governments and clerks did not go to great lengths to save these records for later generations, Williams-Warren said.
"The library and the museum have always had the means or the technology to make sure that they could preserve certain documents," Williams-Warren said.
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