The department tasked with preserving Lauderdale County’s history is facing a space crunch after relocating from the Raymond P. Davis Annex building to the former courthouse on Constitution Avenue, the Lauderdale County Board of Supervisors was told Thursday.

Archives Manager Leslie Joyner said it can be hard to picture the volume of documents her department has under its control. Archives has documents stretching back 191 years, she said, and the collection is growing every day.

In the annex building, archives had approximately 17,000 square feet of storage and workspace, with additional documents kept on pallets on the building’s seventh floor. After the completion of the new Lauderdale County Government Center on 22nd Avenue, archives began relocating to the vacated old courthouse next door. The old courthouse, however, does not offer the same amount of space as the annex did, she said.

Joyner said the usable space on the second and third floors of the old courthouse total 11,464 square feet, roughly 5,000 square feet less than what her department had before. A recent decision by the Board of Supervisors to allow the election commission to use the circuit clerk’s space in the old courthouse for storage and workspace will cut another 2,000 square feet from the space archives needs, she said.

There is additional space in the old courthouse, Joyner said, but not all of it is suitable for records storage. Putting records in the fourth floor jail, for instance, would not be a good idea as it lacks the climate controls needed to preserve the documents.

Requirements for which documents counties are required to keep and for how long are governed by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Joyner said, and different types of records each have their own rules. For example, most financial documents, she said, must be retained for at least three years before being destroyed.

Some records must be retained for decades, Joyner said, and the rules surrounding others make it difficult to destroy them at all. Employee records must be kept for a length of 55 years, a clock that begins the day after they retire. If an employee comes back part time, she said, the clock will reset again.

In the case of medical files for inmates at the Lauderdale County Detention Center, records must be retained for 25 years, Joyner said, but the clock restarts if that person is booked into the detention center again. Without the staff needed to keep track, she said the records are basically held indefinitely.

Documents relating to circuit and chancery court cases have no date when they can be destroyed and must be kept indefinitely, Joyner said, and even scanning the documents to be preserved digitally — an undertaking the county is working on to preserve older, damaged records — does not allow the county to get rid of the paper records.

County Administrator Chris Lafferty said the county has done several rounds of scanning records with good success but the process is cost prohibitive on a large scale. The costs to digitize all of the records in the archives department would be more than the county can legally borrow.

As archives works to adjust to its new space, it’s not just old records that need to be stored, Joyner said. New records are produced daily, and archives is tasked with finding a place to store them.

“We have to allot for that growth,” she said.

At the new courthouse, or Lauderdale County Government Center, supervisors are working to finalize their list of things to be fixed as the building begins to turn nears a year old. Jim Smith of LPK Architects told the board that the list will be presented to contractors to address before calling the project done.

“They will be required to do everything they’re supposed to do,” he said.

The warranty for the building is set to run out on Sept. 5, Lafferty said, and anything supervisors want addressed will need to be documented before then.

Other than the final list, there are two change orders still outstanding on the courthouse project, Smith said. One, which includes the installation of sound panels in the courtrooms and other areas of the building, is expected to be finished by mid September. The other, a door for the circuit clerk’s office, is also in progress. It takes around 12 weeks to get a door, Smith said, but he hopes to have the door jam set and ready when it arrives.