A county Records Management Office provides a service for all other county offices that directly serve citizens. The job of a Records Management Office is to take all paper documents that need to be preserved, from all county offices, and implement a strategy to preserve them.

For many years, the law mandated that all permanent records be preserved on microfilm. When the law changed on January 1, 2001 to allow digitally scanned copies to be legal documents (The Illinois Electronic Records Act), the challenge to find a preservation system that would be both efficient and cost effective increased dramatically.