MOUNT VERNON – Knox County may have to fight in court to reclaim technology it says a former software vendor owes it for the ability to search property records.
The technology in question would allow searches of handwritten records, some dating back two centuries.
The issue arose after a cyberattack hit Cott Systems in December 2022, affecting its customers, representing several hundred governments across 21 states.
“At that point, we were [in] early January, and we had no idea if and when Cott would get back up,” said Knox County Recorder Tanner Salyers.
Hence, the county switched vendors to Compiled Systems, which provides property record searches and an alert system for property transfers.
Now Salyers and his staff are trying to make it easier to search for historical records stretching back 200 years, much of which was handwritten. They need the framework Cott created for those historical indexes, created by scanning the handwritten records with optical character recognition software to make them searchable.
With the structure Cott created for the data, someone hunting for a property could search for records using the first letters of a last name. Once the search was completed, it would be easier to scroll through the names starting with those same letters until the full name was found.
Salyers said the county paid $326,000 from the Recorder’s Office budget from CARES Act funds to digitize the records. However, Cott has not provided the tool necessary for online searches. The company has claimed that the tool is proprietary, but the county disagrees, he said.
In the meantime, the county is working with Cott to make sure it gets what was required under the contract.
“I hope that it can be settled, and we’ll get what we paid for, and it doesn’t have to go any further with litigation. But I need to make sure that we have the images that we’ve paid for,” he said.
As the Recorder’s Office transfers property records from the Cott data structure to Compiled Systems’ version, Salyers had property transfer alerts paused so the switch in providers didn’t cause misleading alerts. During the transition, he paused adding any new property transfers to the system until the data merge is completed. As a result, anyone who registered for the alerts won’t have to do anything to continue under the new provider.
