Invercargill city councilors have voted to boost an in-house digitisation team to help speed up the painstaking job of transferring 30,000 property files into digital copies.

The council began the digitisation process in 2015, but so far, the small in-house team - which has had limited technical resources - has digitised around 24% of the property files.

At the current progress rate, it was estimated that it would take until 2031 before all property files are digitised.

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By resetting the project, hiring dedicated in-house digitisation team, and allocating a budget of $3 million, it’s expected the project will now be completed by 2025.

The further technical support also means the digitization team could receive the right training to complete the project to legislative requirements, allowing the disposal of the source records.

The councillors considered a report at a Performance, Policy and Partnerships committee meeting today. 

Cr Soper commended the report. She said that having had the property file of her home lost and the information gone forever, it was good to get the project sped up to minimize the risk of this happening to others.

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Upon completion of the project, customers would have the ability to view their property file when they want to without having to come into a council office during office hours.

There would be flexibility in council work practices as staff would no longer need to share paper files but could work digitally.

There would be a reduction in the amount of information being lost as the files will be digitised.

Organizational change would "allow staff to become enablers rather than paper managers,” the report said.

The project is scheduled to run from July 2021 to July 2025.