For Orange County, it's an enormous task that involves examining nearly 30 million page images from records dating back to 1970, said Carol Fogelsong, the county's assistant comptroller.

Instead of trying to do the work itself, Orange County last June signed a contract with Hart InterCivic Inc., an Austin-based provider of records management services for county governments.

Since then, the county has downloaded onto USB drives images of about 25 million pages from documents dated through April 30, 2005, and shipped them to Hart for inspection and redaction. Hart has inspected about 7 million pages thus far and found information that needed to be redacted on about 119,000 of them, Fogelsong said.

Pages containing redactions are loaded back onto USB drives and returned to Orange County, which then replaces the original image with the new page. Fogelsong said the original images aren't actually deleted -- they're just hidden from view.

Despite initial concerns about the technology challenges, the redaction process has been going better than expected, according to Fogelsong. She said Hart is using specialized optical character recognition (OCR) software to look for the banned numbers on both handwritten and typed pages. The pages are also being manually reviewed to ensure that nothing is missed, she added.