From The Boston Globe:
As state lawmakers consider creating a municipal record preservation commission to help ensure that essential public records are protected, the sleepy suburb of Reading is emerging as a role model for small towns statewide, replacing stacks of manila folders and dusty filing cabinets with digital software.
Reading is embarking on a technological overhaul of its Town Hall and expects to expand the digital makeover to its police, fire, and school departments. Hundreds of thousands of municipal documents — some in filing cabinets accessible only by a 6-foot ladder — are being converted into online data housed on a virtual cloud, a computer system that allows anyone with an Internet connection to plug into a much larger database without storing the information locally.