Wood County commissioners approved a bid of $197,838 on Nov. 28 to continue the process of preserving the county’s records.

Kofile in Dallas, which has been assisting the county with digitization and preservation efforts for several years, submitted the bid to preserve 48 volumes of county deed records that cover from 1934 to 1941.

The meticulous work is funded through a fee assessed on recording fees and may be used only for preservation.

The project will consist of 30,816 pages of records at a cost of $6.42  per page.

County Clerk Kelley Price and staff oversee the preservation project.

“This particular project, which are the deed records (original big books that were printed from microfilm many years ago in canvassed back books and some that from tape-together and age are falling apart) are boxed and in our climate controlled storage building,” Price said. “Due to the heaviness and fragile state, these books were boxed and stored and not for public usage. Smaller books were created, many, many years ago for public usage and of course now we do not even print books as we have all records digitized.”

Records can now be accessed digitally on a self-service search module available on the county clerk’s page of the Wood County website, mywoodcounty.com.

Price said the preservation of the deed records will take several more years to complete due to the cost.

“As the official record keeper for Wood County I take that (role) seriously, but it seems to be a never-ending task and very costly,” she said.