The DA's Office Goes Digital

Computerworld - In Queens County, N.Y., the district attorney's office was running out of storage space as fast as it was running out of money to rent more. Of the 19,500 cubic feet of case records storage space available to the office, only 775 cubic feet remained. The reasons were many: an increase in the number of prosecutions, an increase in the amount of paperwork associated with the prosecutions and the reduced availability of off-premises storage space in New York City's warehouses.
The finger-in-the-dike answer was to accelerate microfilming of closed case records to gain maximal use of the dwindling space. The office also rented temporary warehouse space at $25,000 per year, using money it would rather have spent putting criminals in jail than papers in a file. Clearly, a less expensive solution was needed. Besides the cash outlay, managing a quarter-century's worth of closed case records stashed at a half-dozen sites was time-consuming and inefficient.
Many of New York City's agencies suffered from the same problem, and they were all scrambling for affordable answers. Working with a $100,000 funding allotment from the state government, the district attorney's office was the first to find one. Together with custom integrator ImageWork Technology Corp. in White Plains, N.Y., the office tried a novel approach. It used Linux for something other than running Apache Web servers.
"If we can afford it, we will look at any promising technology to solve problems, even if it's not mainstream," said Richard A. Brown, the district attorney.
(Red) Hat in Hand
Using Windows NT or Windows 2000 for the office's 425 users wasn't something the office could afford.
In seeking alternative solutions, Brown and his technical staff selected Red Hat Linux 6.0 from Red Hat Inc. in Research Triangle Park, N.C., to power a newly acquired Dell Computer Corp. document imaging server. Linux's appeal stemmed from its low acquisition cost, high availability and the tech support staff's prior familiarity with Data General's version of Unix.
From the perspective of the system's users, the choice of Linux was transparent. Clients are Windows 98 machines that use Internet Explorer to view the imaging files stored on the Dell server. The system handles 85 to 100 inquiries per day.
The document-scanning and image-storing programs are custom applications written by ImageWork. The scanning repository, built on top of IBM's DB2 database, communicates with the office's existing case record database from EMC Corp.'s Data General unit via a custom Visual Basic interface. Data General's database and the Linux/DB2 imaging database each run on independent,