by Alex Brooks
The Town of Petersburgh received word on Monday morning June 5 that the Town had been awarded a grant for $31,365 to improve its handling of town records.[private] The grant was made by New York State Archives ( a division of the NYS Education Department) from a fund called “Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund.”
Town Clerk Deidra Michaels said she has been working with Maria McCashion, the Regional Director of New York State Archives, almost since she began working as Town Clerk. She said McCashion has come out to Petersburgh several times to see the records and the storage areas and to talk with Michaels about how storage areas and management practices could be improved. Out of these discussions came a plan to build a fireproof records room in the basement of the Town Hall.
Michaels also worked with records management consultants Cathy Sickler and Kerry Murphy, who helped her write the grant application which has now turned out to be successful.
The bulk of the grant will be used for construction of the new records room in the Town Hall basement, which will be built with fire-resistant methods and materials to protect the records from fire. The room will have a dehumidifier to provide climate control for preservation of the records. The grant will also pay for training for Deidra Michaels and Brigitta Schmidt in best practices in records management. The consultants Sickler and Murphy who helped write the grant application will provide some of this training.
Michaels said some of the Town’s records have been filed in two fireproof filing cabinets in the records room, and the rest are in bins in the hallway of the basement, which remain “not well organized and not secure.”
There are a few administrative details to iron out to make the grant award final, which should be completed in a few weeks, and then the first step will be to put together specifications for the construction work on the records room, and put them out to bid to find a contractor to do the work. [/private]