The Role Of Document Management In Law Enforcement

Exegetics, a Blacksburg, Va.-based developer of document management software, has been working with law enforcement organizations since 1993. The company's primary product, inVize, allows police departments, prison administrators, and others to locate and view digitally-stored records at the touch of a button.

"Our customers have been inquiring about color document capture," said Rick Fenrich, CEO of Exegetics. "We turned to Kodak at that point, and found some intriguing possibilities for integration with our software."

One such option was the Kodak Digital Science Color Scanner 3590C, which eliminates trial-and-error adjustments often required by black-and-white scanners. With Kodak color capture technology, all parts of the document - whether a color-coded drawing of an accident scene or annotations on a report - can be viewed as originally intended.

"We also found the law enforcement community requesting an integrated imaging approach, one that was consistent with past processes, yet adaptable for future trends," continued Fenrich. "That's how we came to integrate the Exegetics systems with the Kodak Document Archive Writer. We're also considering integration with the Intelligent Microimage Scanner when the need arises."




The Kodak Document Archive Writer 4800 rapidly converts digital documents to analog, human-readable images stored on microfilm, providing low-cost, long-term preservation and access. The Intelligent Microimage Scanner reverses the process, finding and digitizing microfilmed images for rapid display on a PC workstation.

While a law enforcement agency's records are being converted to microfilm for long-term preservation, Exegetic's inVize software indexes the records and builds an information database. Then, when someone wants to view a stored record, a few key commands retrieve it for on-screen display and printing. Unique to inVize is a redaction feature based on a user's security status, thus allowing records managers to block access to certain information contained in a document.

Fenrich described a typical scenario. "For instance, we may set up a system in a police office to archive all records. In the past, if a member of the public wanted a copy of a criminal complaint, he had to request it from the desk clerk. The clerk then had to sort through filed records, copy the requested document, and determine what parts to block out based on privacy rights. This could take from five minutes to a half hour, and would be repeated time and time again each day."

"With the Exegetics and Kodak solution, that member of the public can log in as a guest to a records workstation, request the document, and have it appear within seconds - with the parts of the document not in the public domain blacked out. This feature of our system can be particularly helpful to insurance companies who are pulling accident reports when working on claims."

Fenrich notes that such enabling solutions are the result of a forward-looking partnership between Exegetics, Kodak, and the law enforcement community. "Our combined offering integrates tried and proven technology with technology that's leading edge to consistently meet customer needs."

Kodak Digital Imaging Products