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Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Ind. Courts - "Vanderburgh County Court records go online today: Private firm will be charging access fee"

Thomas B. Langhorne reports today in a lengthy story in the Evansville Courier & Press:

EVANSVILLE — An idea Vanderburgh County has studied for years — court records widely available on the Internet — becomes a reality today.

Vanderburgh County announced Monday that electronic records for criminal and civil cases dating from 2005 to the present will go online this morning on the Web site of a private firm that already posts court records online in 47 other Indiana counties.

Data for more than a million cases for which computerized records exist, dating to January 1993, will be loaded continuously into a database operated by Richmond, Ind.-based Doxpop LLC with the goal of completing the work before Christmas.

But access to all but limited information on pending cases and court calendars will cost you.

Rather than have the county pay start-up costs, estimated to be as high as $250,000, Vanderburgh County agreed last year to let Doxpop absorb the costs and attempt to recoup them through subscriptions. * * *

The new initiative eases a loss for County Clerk Susan Kirk, who already had disclosed plans to close a library of six free public-access computers used for looking up case information to shift the employee supervising it to fill a vacant small-claims clerk position she called indispensable.

It comes as Indiana Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard continues to pursue a separate project, through the Judicial Technology and Automation Committee (JTAC), to link Indiana courts electronically and post their case records online free of charge.

But that project relies on a different case management system, Odyssey, from a different software database provider, Tyler Technologies.

Shepard has proposed linking all Indiana courts by 2015, but the judicial committee and Doxpop have not struck an agreement on how the private firm would be able to interface with the state's Odyssey system. For the time being, local users could not access Odyssey's court records through Doxpop.

The "six free public access computers" refer to this Evansville Courier & Pressstory, "Clerk unplugging computers: Staff cut ending free public access", quoted in an ILB entry from Nov. 28th.

But users who are not Doxpop subscribers may look up the cause number for any pending case, and browse court calendars by week or day at no cost, via their cells or computers, mitigating the loss of the six public terminals. The ILB also checked the Doxpop blog, which shows that:

ILB thoughts: As indicated in the upper right-hand corner of this blog, Doxpop has been a supporter of the ILB since April 1, 2008. But for years, as longtime ILB readers will recall (here is the long list of entries), the ILB has been writing on the project to link together the case information in the county courts and the possibility of JTAC and Doxpop working cooperatively. I see no signs of progress however.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 1, 2009 09:40 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts