Islip Town's records center gets $325,000 upgrade to make it safer, more efficient

The Town of Islip has renovated its records center after deeming the former shelving system unsafe.

The $325,000 renovation encompassed, among other things, replacing the room’s lighting and fire detection system, and the rolling shelves that store more than 4,400 boxes of documents. The improvements have eased the record retrieval process, shortening turnaround time on requests from a few days to just a few minutes, according to staff in the town historian’s office.

“The biggest thing is the workflow," said Islip Town Historian George Munkenbeck. "It used to sometimes take as much as a couple of days to get to something. Now, we’ve actually [pulled records] in under a minute, since we’ve been able to do this."

Islip Town Clerk Olga Murray said the renovations became a priority after the state and town declared the rolling storage shelves a safety hazard.

“We were afraid of the [old] shelves derailing,” she said. “They recognized that it was an emergency situation. This is probably one of the quickest projects that’s ever been completed in the town.”

The project was funded with a $75,000 grant from the New York State Records Management Improvement Fund and $325,000 capital funding from the Islip Town Board, according to Murray.

The project, which used the grant funding first, has not used all the funding available for renovations from the town, Murray said.

Munkenbeck said that, besides the shelves, upgrades included painting over windows in the room to protect aging documents from sunlight; rearranging and cleaning out the office to create more work space for staff and researchers; and removing old wiring and pipes from the ceiling.

He said that while it was sad to see the old shelving go, the mechanisms and rails had clearly "far exceeded their life span."

Personnel and assessor records are some of the more popular records requests that come in for the archives room, which Murray called the town’s “inactive records center.” Documents are brought to the historian’s office in Town Hall West when they’re not in frequent use, she said.

Murray, who is leaving her position at the end of the year, said she has been pushing for the remodel for more than a decade.

“This center has not been expanded in the 12 years I’ve been here, and I know not within recent history before that," she said.  "Permanent boxes are piling up and we’re running out of room. And we’re certainly not the little town that we were … years ago."

Murray said she hopes that more space will eventually be designated to store town records.

Islip Supervisor Angie Carpenter said the renovations to the records center were “essential to preserving and maintaining Islip’s history for future generations,” noting that the office stores town records dating back more than 300 years.

The town historian's office also has been working to digitize birth, death and marriage records, as well as town minutes and highway books to further improve record storage and accessibility.

By Brianne Ledda

brianne.ledda@newsday.com@brianne_ledda

Brianne Ledda covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. She previously covered Southold and Greenport for The Suffolk Times and is a graduate of Stony Brook University.