MOULTRIE, Ga. — The Colquitt County government is dipping its toes into the cloud as it looks to start storing some records electronically to save money and boost efficiency.

Colquitt County Commission approved last week the expenditure of $52,000 to begin the process of saving some administrative records electronically. The proposal from MCCi of Tallahassee, a records and documents management company, calls for spending $42,137 for software and employee training and $9,650 for scanning paper records for electronic storage.

The county has some $250,000 on hand from a 2002 sales tax earmarked for a records repository. At the time taxpayers approved that special purpose local option sales tax, which also included courthouse renovation, it was thought the money would go toward constructing a repository building or outfitting an existing structure for storing paper records.

In the intervening years the efficiency of computer-based storage has improved.

The county expects to reduce the need for future physical storage space.

“This software is used by several counties,” said County Clerk Melissa Lawson, who also is records custodian for the county.

The roll out will be on a small scale and will include records such as those of departments such as Roads & Bridges, clerk records, finance and human resources. The system will be set up to restrict the use of records — personnel records, for instance, will only be available to authorized personnel who have reason for that access.

“As records custodian I’ll be able to run a report to tell who opened records, the time and what (was) done with records,” Lawson said.

Older records, such as meeting minutes, will be kept for preservation.

“We’ll be keeping them for historical continuity,” Lawson said.

The initial effort, at least, does not call for copying records from constitutional offices such as the tax commissioner and clerk of court for electronic storage.

State law has varying requirements for the length of time records must be preserved, and some, such as certain court records, must be kept indefinitely, she said.