Update: Is the Lack of an Embossed Seal the Key?

Hey, if they don't use microfilm or microfiche how do they get their photostats ~ those xerox 914 systems ended up being dirt cheap so referring to a microfiche to provide new copies would be a lot cheaper than requiring someone to pull the files and copy a BC.

It would also give you back up in case of disaster ~ not that live on top one of the world's tallest volcanos isn't something like a disaster as it is!

According to the Wikipedia, the Xerox 914 was introduced in 1959, and, by the end of 1961, Xerox was up to $60m in revenue. But my recollection is, Xerox machines didn't start popping up everywhere until the mid to late sixties. I wonder when the Hawaii Department of Health bought their first Xerox machine. Those Nordyke long form copies were issued in 1966 and were clearly photostats (negative images).

The best thing for Hawaii to do would be to scan all their documents at 300dpi and save them in a database replicated on the mainland in case Mauna Loa goes. But they probably have several million documents by now, so it would cost a nice sum to scan them all and check them over to ensure they match up with the existing metadata they have in their database.

At 20,000 BCs per year, then you have about 52/53 years worth of records, or OVER 1 million since statehood. Earlier records would presumably be under the control of National Archives.

I think these guys been shuckin' and jivin' and they have microfilm and/or microfiche records with copies back to Statehood!.

The 9/14 (according to several histories on the net) was able to do about 20 copies per hour which made it quite suitable for hooking up with a camera.

It was a "heavy duty" paper mover primarily, and a photocopier secondarily, and then it had these other uses that dovetailed nicely with the technology of the time (microfiche systems).

So, let's envision bound files for a moment. With 1,000,000 records ~ with something like a 28 pound paper weight, and 200 pieces per ream, that'd be 5,000 reams.

At 5 pounds per ream, you'd have 25,000 pounds of paper, or roughly 12.5 tons.

Double that weight for folders, hangers, cheap file cabinets, personnel walking around, stray coffee cups, and maybe even a set of wheels with fancy spinners and you could easily have 25 tons. Real quick, GM's standard for floor capacity when using a lift to load a truck with this gross weight is: "The floor on which the lift is to be installed must be 5 inch minimum thickness concrete with a minimum compressive strength of 3000 PSI, and reinforced with steel bar."

Open storage space would probably need to have 1800 sq ft set aside for the cabinet footprints, and about 1.25 times that for access, aisles and airflow and so forth, and that'd give you 4,000 sq. ft. for the paper record file storage area. At a cost of about $185 per square foot (current value) for that sort of space, that give you just under $800,000 for the file room ~ plus HVAC and dehumidfication equipment ~ lights ~ and several hundred additional square foot adjunct so you could do microfiche and crank this stuff down to digital files stored on a handful of DVDs.

Someone has said they've seen the file room. Was it about 4,000 sq. ft. (That's about 40ft by 100ft so you couldn't miss it ~ be a big room!)?

Given bureaucracy's insatiable need for more space, a bigger office ~ right over there in the corner, more toilets, wider aisles ~ extra snack areas ~ I doubt even this DOH could keep control of that much space. They must have been under intense pressure to "give it up" long ago, so what did they do?

1961 - 17,578 births in Hawaii

It's up; it's down ~ I used 20K because that's a number that had some stability over time.

50 years and you got a million records ~ an easy number to work with.

Someone has said they've seen the file room. Was it about 4,000 sq. ft. (That's about 40ft by 100ft so you couldn't miss it ~ be a big room!)?

Given bureaucracy's insatiable need for more space, a bigger office ~ right over there in the corner, more toilets, wider aisles ~ extra snack areas ~ I doubt even this DOH could keep control of that much space. They must have been under intense pressure to "give it up" long ago, so what did they do?

You make good case for scanning the whole lot. However, it seems they are trying to keep people from getting anything but the short form as much as possible. So, the records room is probably a pretty lonely place.

I think I read that their database, which they use to produce the short forms, goes back to 1909. So, a million or two BCs by now would be a ballpark estimate. Hawaii had about 18k births in 1996 and 19k in 2009. At 500 BCs per book that would be three or four thousand volumes.

I remember visiting the Southern Middlesex County Deeds Registry in the late eighties. It was big room in the old court house in East Cambridge, MA with stacks and stacks of books. There were a couple of 3270 terminals you could use to search the grantor/grantee index (then a recent improvement over card files). It would show you the locations of recorded documents by book and page number. You wrote those down on scrap paper and walked off to pick the books off the shelf. There were a bunch of tables with people sitting at them perusing volumes and making phone calls on bag phones. In one corner of the hall there was a busy battery of coin-operated copy machines.

Nowadays, you can get it all on the web. I just looked up a neighbor's property in the online index. The earliest record is a deed from 1981, book 14184, page 254. The most recent is a mortgage from last March, book 56558, page 477. That's a lot of paper. And just for part of one county.