8-Specifications.pdf

SPECIFICATIONS

SCOPE

Harris County is currently seeking proposals from qualified vendors to provide supplementary record indexing services for the Harris County Clerk's Office (CCO) for one (1) year beginning approximately December 1, 2025.

It is the responsibility of each vendor to examine the entire offer package, seek clarification in writing, and review their offer for accuracy before submitting. Questions relating to this RFP must be submitted in writing through Bonfire. The deadline for submission of questions relating to this offer is listed on the Events Schedule within Bonfire. All questions submitted in writing prior to the deadline will be compiled and answered in writing. A copy of all questions and answers will be released as a Public Notice to all firms through Bonfire. The County will not be bound by any information conveyed verbally.

RENEWAL OPTIONS

Harris County may consider four (4) one-year renewal options, based upon the same terms, conditions and pricing as the original year. Renewal is subject to approval by Harris County Commissioners Court. Once renewal options are exhausted, the contract must be rebid. Harris County reserves the right to rebid at any time as is in its best interest and is not automatically bound to renew.

BACKGROUND

This scope of work constitutes a supplementary solicitation to the primary contract 23/0426 for the Vital Records Preservation Project for Harris County Clerk's Office, which remains fully in effect. The vendor shall ensure that all supplementary work remain separate from the original contract, rather than a modification or addition to it.

The total background surrounding the need to transferring microfilm to digital imaging conversion and image enhancement and indexing services can be broken down into mission, current operations, and classification of records:

Mission – The mission of the CCO is to maintain a perpetual, comprehensive set of public records consisting of all documents appropriately presented for recording; and make the public records easily accessible for viewing by any member of the public.

The CCO currently has records available for viewing in house on a database created by the CCO in-house Information Technology department. Records dated as early as the 1830’s will be available in their entirety for viewing by any member of this project. To complete this project successfully, cohesion between the potential vendor and the CCO will be necessary.

Current Operations – The CCO is responsible for the records recorded with the CCO. Any information created or received by a CCO pursuant to law or in the transaction of public business is a local government record, regardless of whether it is a document, paper, letter, book, photograph, sound or video recording, microfilm, magnetic tape, electronic medium, or any other type of information recording medium. The CCO duties and responsibilities are governed by the Local Government Records Act (Chapters 201-205, Local Government Code). The Act applies to all local governments and elected County officials.

This is an ongoing process that has been taking place for more than a decade. Much, if not all our microfilm has already been imaged, as well as a large majority of our archived books. However, since this is an ongoing

Supplementary Record Indexing Services for the Harris County Clerk's Office process, digital images sometimes need further enhancements, further indexing requirements, and additional work to meet the needs of the CCO. The vendor shall need to coordinate with the CCO to determine the best practices for retrieving images/indexes that are in our system needing further enhancements/index fields, etc.

In order to fulfill the CCO records management obligation, the CCO has established programs for the efficient and cost-effective management of records of its offices. The CCO has the discretion to transfer temporarily for the purpose of microfilming, conversion to electronic media, restoration, or other records management activities.

Classification of Records – The CCO has chosen to maintain records on microfilm as provided by Chapter 204, Local Government Code and some rules have been adopted under that chapter. The CCO has chosen to divide the instruments received for filing, registering, or recording into the following six (6) classes for recording on microfilm as follows (Local Government Code Sec. 193.008):

1. Records relating to real property, known as "Official Public Records of Real Property",

2. Records relating to probate matters, known as "Official Public Records of Probate",

3. Records relating to county civil court matters, known as "Official Public Records of County Civil

Courts",

4. Records relating to matters in the Commissioners Court, known as "Official Public Records of

Commissioners Court",

5. Records relating to an individual, a business entity, or a governmental agency other than a property record or a court record, known as "Official Public Records of Government, Business, and Personal Matters (Personal Records) and

6. Records relating to elections, known as "Official Elections Records".

SPECIFICATION

The vendor shall provide an overview of the methodology and detail of procedures for the microfilm conversion with image enhancements and indexing services. The CCO would also like the vendor to provide a pricing model and their process to perform the services listed both on-site and off-site (vendor facility and County facility). The vendor shall state the goals and how you will achieve them. All work shall be performed by the vendor (a single solution). No subcontractors shall be used without prior authorization from the CCO. All work shall be performed onshore in a secure facility. No work is to be performed outside the continental United States.

A. SECURITY STORAGE AND HANDLING

The vendor shall provide details on offered security requirements. Generally, security includes safeguarding the source record, protecting the integrity of the information that it contains, protecting the confidentiality of the information, and providing a disaster recovery plan for the film digital data and images. The vendor shall describe the following:

Procedure to assure each roll of film (or source record) is logged out and accounted for throughout the lifecycle of the process.

Procedure of the safety of the roll of film (or source record) in transit and in production during the process.

Procedure for protecting the integrity of the information contained in the roll of film (or source record).

Describe the procedures for transporting source records for off-site services (method, process and vehicles for transporting).

Backup and disaster recovery options.

Off-site and on-site options (pricing shall reflect both options).

Security requirements for personnel off-site and on-site.

Facility security.

Describe the facility in which the rolls of film (or source records) would be stored during the process.

It is recommended that the vendor stores the rolls of film or source record in a climate controlled environment and or a secure firelock vault safe.

No subcontracting or offshore processing of (including conversion, image enhancements and indexing services).

A web-based tracking system shall be included for rolls of film (or source records) transporting through the process.

As part of the County's due diligence, these requirements shall be verified by the CCO via a formal inspection after proposal submittals and prior to the award.

B. CHAIN OF CUSTODY/INVENTORY TRACKING

The ability to track the rolls of film (or source records) is paramount to the success of this project.

Describe the chain of custody procedures. Whether the vendor is processing source records on-site or off-site there shall be a policy and procedure in place, and such shall be documented and followed for the project.

Please describe what mechanisms or software applications for film/image tracking. Describe the flexibility that it may contain and how it could possibly be beneficial in any records management solution.

Is it a standalone application that shall assist moving and managing our records internally after project completion?

Information to be noted during the inventory phase shall include information from source record’s label and any information that shall later be indexed which shall aid in ensuring the input (source record coming to vendor's facility) equals the output (source record and electronic images leaving the vendor's facility).

C. QUALITY ASSURANCE

A quality assurance and control program shall be initiated, documented, and maintained throughout the life of this project. One hundred percent (100%) of images shall be visually checked for quality assurance by a human operator. Automated quality assurance tasks or random samplings are not permitted. The vendor shall document all quality control procedures and any actions taken including correction of problems and submit a quality review report along with the scanning log with each delivery to the CCO.

The vendor shall check and validate that the bitonal and grayscale output/image counts match for accuracy as well as making sure that no information is lost when converting to bitonal. Things like stamps and seals that are not very dark can be completely washed away with a bad bitonal conversion. If humans are comparing bitonal and grayscale side by side they can spot these missing items and adjust as needed. The vendor's response shall include a quality assurance process along with its methodologies.

The vendor shall describe their process quality assurance with respect to digitizing film. Part of ensuring the success would be to ensure that the records converted can be retrieved and are clear and readable. The vendors quality assurance process shall contain at a minimum:

Source record handling, Source record preparation, Source record scanning, Source record indexing, Source record quality assurance, and Random sampling of records converted or one hundred percent (100%) review.

Industry standards in conversion cannot be overstated. The vendor shall scan and index records to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards. These standards are designed to ensure the digital records remain as useful and as legally valid as the original source recorded. The vendor shall ensure high quality document image and retrieval well into the future.

D. CERTIFIED PROJECT MANAGEMENT (CPM)

Based on the scope, size and complexity of this project, the CCO shall require a successful vendor to have a CPM on-site at the CCO facility to monitor project status and communicate with County personnel.

The CCO Project Manager will manage and coordinate this effort while the vendor's CPM shall perform a similar function for the vendor. The CCO Project Manager and the vendor's CPM shall serve as the principal points of communication between the two (2) organizations. The objective of the project management approach is to ensure detailed forward planning for work breakdown and schedules at the task level, facilitate communication to maintain an efficient schedule, to report contract performance on an accurate and objective bases and to identify any problems or issues that may arise during performance of this project as early as possible.

Meetings with the CCO Project Manager and other selected county employees may be required to discuss the tasks, as necessary, throughout the project period. The vendors shall include an explanation of their project management methodologies and client engagement process.

For purposes of this project, vendor's key personnel are defined as the Project Manager and designated alternate, digital scanning personnel and quality assurance inspectors. The vendor's Project Manager or designated alternate shall have full authority to represent the vendor in all matters regarding the contract.

The Project Manager or designated alternate· shall be in contact within two (2) business days after receiving notification (telephone, email, facsimile, or in writing) from the CCO to discuss any technical or contractual matters.

The vendor shall provide the following:

Issue resolution - every project has issues, large or small, successful resolution is key to the success of the overall project, CPM or designated alternative resumes, Technical background as it relates to the scope of this project, Years of experience as it relates to the scope of this project and Information on large-scale conversion, image enhancement and indexing projects on-site and off-site.

Together with the vendor, the CCO will set up project milestones and deliverables for a minimum of images to be converted, enhanced and partial index. As the project progresses, the project milestones and deliverables as well as the payment milestones may be adjusted to accommodate the evolving timetable.

The vendor shall provide a project plan that would provide a reasonable and realistic timeframe for project completion prior to contract signing. The CCO understands that the projected plan is subject to change throughout the duration of the project.

Project Tracking The vendor shall have a software application as mentioned above to aid in the tracking of the source record in the conversion at the image level from source record to image system. This system shall be able to be queried at any point by the CCO to check the status of the conversion and location of any source record and image. The vendor shall keep track of images missing from the source materials and add a placeholder image if one does not exist.

E. FILM CONVERSION & IMAGE ENHANCEMENT

To ensure a complete successful conversion of microfilm to digital images the vendor shall be able to comply with the following:

Provide a schematic of their conversion workflow.

Provide quality control and QA that is necessary to produce the best possible image without sacrificing accuracy or image integrity because of the varied media and age of some of the microfilm.

Full technology service and solutions provider.

Provide a high level of quality service and guaranteed minimal accuracy of ninety-nine-point ninety-five percent (99.95%) to ensure the CCO records conversion plan is a smooth transition to new technology and an overall success.

Full range of knowledge and understanding of public records, government processes and Local Government Codes that govern Harris County.

Source Record Scanning The vendor shall describe the scanning process and hardware used to scan the source record. High volume and high quality throughput scanners are suggested. The conversion process shall operate at peak efficiency and produce precise images while providing the process for source record conversion. The CCO will provide the vendor with the attributes and metadata that will allow the vendor to link images and index records.

The vendor shall be responsible for ensuring that all images and any metadata are ready to be loaded into the CCO internal viewing applications and website.

The vendor shall have a source record processing lab where inspections shall be done by the vendor prior to scanning film. The inspection process shall help ensure that any film too brittle for scanning is detected prior to damaging. In the event that the film cannot be used for scanning, then the County will provide another source for scanning.

Image Enhancement Images that have been scanned shall now be ready for image enhancement. The vendor shall describe the software and process it employs to enhance the images quality and increase the recognition accuracy of any automated future process. Image enhancement software and process shall provide the minimum:

Straightened skewed and angled images, Detection and removal of black borders, Removal of unwanted lines in type text/forms, Removal of random pixels in images (despeckling), Removal of shaded backgrounds, Sharpen the edges of type characters (edge enhancements), and Detect and resolve film Redox for final production image.

The records that represent the source for vendor-produced digital images may vary from task to task and from type of record to specific task. For this reason, a survey of the film/records shall be acceptable by vendor. The survey shall be done on-site at the CCO. Specific variables shall include the following:

directory and file name structures, tracking page numbers, missing records identifiers, deteriorating film, cropping two-page film images to produce single-page digital images, quality of the source material and inconsistent page total values.

All documents shall be sized to their correct size and aspect ratio to represent a true facsimile of the original document. The images to be produced shall be printable as outlined. Images shall print as legible document productions using commercially available off the shelf software. The images shall produce legible results on single sheets of paper up to 8-1/2" x 11". The tagged image file format (TIFF) header tags shall be set to prevent printing anomalies, e.g. "postage stamp" printing which occurs when typical software interprets the image as being actual size of the image on the original microfilm.

Irrespective of the polarity of the film that is provided for scanning, all delivered images shall reproduce the polarity of the original document i.e. paper is white, and ink is black. In the delivered digital image, the orientation shall remain identical to the original; the top of the original document shall appear at the top of the display screen, regardless of the orientation of the document in the film.

In many of the CCO documents, the document properties are photographed with a larger film frame.

In filmed documents, it is common to find documents that occupy about one half of the area of the frame. The following requirements shall apply for cropping of specified frames. When the document collection contains sets of images of documents that are the same size and thus permit a crop window to be established, this crop window shall be used to produce a run of digital images that reproduce less than the full frame. In no event shall the actual document be cropped. All cropping shall be done slightly beyond the edge i.e. allow the edge of the sheet to show in the digital reproduction.

Ribbon grayscale images of complete rolls of film are preferred. Images shall be stored in Intel TIFF files with header content specified below. Images shall be delivered in directories with file names as specified. Grayscale TIFF images shall be accepted where required and shall result in greater image quality. In no case shall any proprietary compression technique be applied.

Film shall be scanned at 300 dots per inch (DPI) minimum resolution as grayscale. Two (2) output copies as follows: the first one as a 300 DPI grayscale ribbon and the second one as a 300 DPI bitonal TIFF. Image storage format as Multi-Page-TIFF.

Film Conversion Information The CCO has determined the following:

o Film Review Microfilm is primarily sixteen millimeters (16MM) and a small quantity of thirty-five millimeters (35MM) format, Microfilm varies from thick to thin based film, No film is in duplex format, In the case of unacceptable source record quality or missing source record, the CCO has another source book/document to scan, The information on the container for each roll is accurate to the best of the CCO knowledge, and The vendor shall inspect and provide an accurate inventory as a part of this scope, which shall be matched against the CCO electronic inventory to maintain integrity.

o Image quality

To the best of the CCO knowledge, much of the data contained in the film can be read and The vendor shall be required to provide the CCO with an option with software that allows the

CCO the ability to do additional image clean up on an as-needed basis.

o Storage

Image clean-up effects image file size, thus effects overall storage and back-up requirements.

The vendor shall assist in determining the hardware specifications for image storage.

Output The CCO maintains a combination of image formats within our repository. The most common is single-page-TIFF. As described above the vendor shall provide two (2) output image copies. The first one as a 300 DPI, grayscale or color JPEG and the second one is a 300 DPI bitonal TIFF. Image storage format as Multi

- Page - TIFF.

Current Image Repository consists of the following:

Stage 1 – Raw Scans Stage 2 – Enhanced Images Stage 3 – Reconstructively Enhanced Images

The vendor shall describe their method for delivery of the images back to the CCO. The delivered sets of images shall be coherently and logically named and or numbered, scanned document filenames shall be constructed as follows:

\FILM\<RestrictionLevel>\<DocumentType>\<ContentType>\<SeriesNumber>\<RollNumber>\<Fil mCodeNumbe r>.TIF

Restriction Level - This indicates whether the document is restricted or unrestricted.

Restricted UnRestricted Original (When a document is redacted, the unredacted original is placed here)

Document Type - This is the type of document Civil Probate Real Property Condos Maps

ContentType - This describes the type of content on the roll Index Instrument

Series Number - The series portion of the Film Code, typically 3 digits with the exception of the 5 digit ER and RP numbers in Real Property

Roll Number - This is the portion of the Film Code that identifies the roll. Typically, 5 digits.

Material originating from archive books is stored in **STAGE 1** as follows:

For Indexes

\BOOK\<RestrictionLevel>\<DocumentType>\<Collection>\<ContentType>\<IndexName>\<Volum eNumber>\

<PageNumber>.TIF

For Instruments

\BOOK\<RestrictionLevel>\<DocumentType>\<Collection>\<ContentType>\<VolumeNumber>\<Pa geNumber>.

TIF

Restriction Level - This indicates whether the document is restricted or unrestricted.

Restricted UnRestricted Original (When a document is redacted, the unredacted original is placed here)

Document Type - This is the type of document Civil Probate Real Property Condos Maps

ContentType - This describes the type of content in the volume

Index Instrument

Collection - This is the collection of books that the image belongs in Deeds Mortgages Contracts Marriage Licenses

VolumeNumber - This is the volume number of the book

Material originating from archive books is stored in **STAGE 2** as follows:

For Instruments \BOOK\<RestrictionLevel>\<CollectionAbbreviation>\<VolumeNumber>\C-V-P.TIF

ex. \Book\UnRestricted\DEED\2344\DEED-2344-9.tif

Restriction Level - This indicates whether the document is restricted or unrestricted.

Restricted UnRestricted Original (When a document is redacted, the unredacted original is placed here)

CollectionAbbreviation - This is the abbreviation for the collection to which the book belongs.

DEED

MG

CNTR

MAR

VolumeNumber - This is the volume number of the book

C-V-P - This is the Collection|Volume|Page standard name

To ensure successful indexing, the vendor shall be able to capture information pertaining to the source record (document/page identifiers) numbers. The indexing shall be customizable for the CCO requirements.

**** For Commissioner’s Court Records collaboration between vendor and customer shall be required to find a suitable naming convention for these records based on their content type and topic. ****

F. PARTIAL INDEXING REQUIREMENTS

Accurate and consistent indexing to the CCO official records shall ensure quick reliable access to the images. The CCO will provide the digital index database, and which contains attributes and corresponding metadata that shall accurately identify and link images to our digital index. In addition, to ensure accuracy the vendor shall provide a method for the following, database validation and audit controls. Assigning filenames and naming directories for the images shall be performed. One hundred percent (100%) accuracy is required for file and directory structure. A full Indexing of Deeds, Mortgages and Contracts for the time period of 6/27/1959 to 10/31/1960 – estimated to be 219,184 instruments.

Indexing Fields are listed as follows:

Land Records – Field Name Recorded Date

Recorded Time Document Date Document Number Document Type Code Grantor (s) – Last, First, MI + Grantor (s) – Role Status Code Grantee (s) – Last, First, MI + Grantor (s) – Role Status Code Legal – Subdivision + Legal – Lot (s) + Legal – Block (s) + Legal – Section Legal – Township Legal – Range Legal – Acreage Collection Abbreviation Volume Number Page Number Reference Book and Page Number

Court Records – Field Name Recorded Date Recorded Time Case Number Docket Number Plaintiff Name Defendant Name

Vital Records – Field Name Recorded Date Recorded Time Marriage Date Marriage Certificate Number Bride Name Groom Name Middle Full Name

G. WARRANTY

The accuracy and quality of the images delivered shall require a warranty of five (5) years. Should the CCO find issues with any image or batch of images within this warranty period the vendor shall rescan the frames at no charge within fourteen (14) days. The vendor shall hold the backup of all images for the length of a five (5) years warranty period or until the County requests destruction at no extra charge. The name and address of the vendor's holding facility shall be provided.