Case Study: City of Niagara Falls achieves an organized, searchable document repository with Laserfiche

New Users: Organize Your Repository with Advice from the City of Niagara Falls

Laserfiche worked with the City of Niagara Falls, where initial scanning was done without a clear plan and staff struggled to find documents amid hundreds of search hits. Contributed by the city's Records and Elections Coordinator, the case explains how a lack of foresight in repository organization limited the system’s usefulness for departments like Planning and Finance.

The city solved the problem by building a logical file structure (mirroring paper files), creating templates and searchable fields (with drop-down lists for things like month, year, document type, company/subdivision), and appointing a Laserfiche “champion” to train users and oversee indexing. As a result, staff can now browse familiar folders or run precise searches with far fewer irrelevant hits, adoption and consistency have improved, and documents are properly filed for easier long-term retrieval.

City of Niagara Falls

Bill Matson

Records and Elections Coordinator