CLEVELAND, Tenn. — Local archives are suffering from information overload.
An overload of paper, that is.
The Bradley County Archives Office is not accepting more paperwork from county offices until some shredding is done, officials said.
The office stores paperwork such as criminal investigation files, genealogical records, court decisions and subdivision plats. Attorneys, court clerks, researchers and people needing to clarify criminal background checks for employment use the files.
Routine shredding will take some pressure off the archives office, which is in the county courthouse basement, County Mayor D. Gary Davis said.
“As they take things out to shred or dispose of, it opens up more space,” he said.
Since several county offices use the archives, it’s up to the various elected officials over each office to decide when the paperwork can be shredded, Mr. Davis said.
“We’ve done a lot of shredding the last few years, but there has been more accumulation, too,” he said.
At the Bradley County Justice Center, boxes of criminal investigation material that might be helpful to a cold case some day are sitting in a room.
“We are always going to keep the homicide files,’’ said Capt. Steve Lawson, who heads the criminal investigations division of the Bradley County Sheriff’s Office. Potential cold case files, such as homicides, are kept in the original form for up to 100 years, he said.
The department keeps original investigation files until the statute of limitations runs out on that particular crime, Capt. Lawson said. But the lack of storage space is an issue, he said.
“We are going to have to come up with a solution,” he said.
Many county records are stored on computers, county officials said. But some information, such as juvenile court cases, involves privacy issues, whether they’re on paper or in computers.
County Commissioner Howard Thompson, who is chairman of the commission’s Law Enforcement Committee, said the committee recently discussed the storage issue.
Document storage space was built into the justice center, he said, and juvenile court has its own document storage space.
Commissioner Lisa Stanbery said the county’s Information Technology Committee may look into more electronic storage.
Randall Higgins covers news in Cleveland, Tenn., for the Times Free Press. He started work with the Chattanooga Times in 1977 and joined the staff of the Chattanooga Times Free Press when the Free Press and Times merged in 1999. Randall has covered Southeast Tennessee, Northwest Georgia and Alabama. He now covers Cleveland and Bradley County and the neighboring region. Randall is a Cleveland native. He has bachelor’s degree from Tennessee Technological University. His awards ...
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