Other states are looking at similar record-keeping issues, Miller said. 'There's a move afoot in Colorado a little bit and in Pennsylvania a little bit, but no one has this hard-stop deadline like in Florida as far as I'm aware of,' he said.

Another vendor, ImageTech Systems Inc. in Camp Hill, Pa., has built a plug-in redaction module for a widely-used Kofax Ascent Capture application from Kofax Image Products Inc. of Irvine, Calif. R.J. Oommen, principal of ImageTech, said his company so far has no customers in Florida but is beginning to target that state's local governments to offer the redaction module.

The module uses several methods to analyze online scanned images, including user input on the fly, automatic processing of data in standard forms and an intelligence algorithm that uses 'confidence thresholds' and verification modules to automate the process with very little human interaction, Oommen said. The module starts at $5,000, but that price can exceed $100,000 depending on the project, he said.

Other redaction vendors include SRS Technologies, which offers its Document Detective software; Appligent Inc., which offers a Redax redaction module for use with PDF files; and Image Architects Inc., which offers a redaction template creation plug-in for Kofax Ascent Capture and IBM Content Manager applications.

Barbara Petersen, president of the Tallahassee, Fla.-based First Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit media group that supports open government, said the redaction of private information from public records is a right of the state's residents. Although the Florida Supreme Court is now reviewing how private information should be disclosed in court records, Petersen said, redcating data from online documents shouldn't be an issue among county clerks -- because doing so doesn't modify the original document, which is still on file unaltered.