Datatrac already plans expansion, hiring of 100 more employees

One of Williamsburg’s newest businesses, Datatrac, which employees more than 250 people, is already planning an expansion after only three weeks of operation.
The company hopes to add another 100 employees by the end of the year through a second call in its contract that will require building additional storage areas and a better mail processing facility inside the facility.
Vince Ley, director for strategic development, said the Williamsburg facility is contracted to digitize one million documents during the first year of its five-year contract, but that number is expected to increase to two million documents a year through the second call of the contract.
Initially, the company is digitizing historical type documents, such as applications for green cards or citizenship, but the second call also involves digitizing documents for Immigrations Custom Enforcement and other customs agents so that information can be quickly and easily accessed.
“Currently it is on a five year contract. We are trying to cooperate with USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to make this a permanent facility,” Ley said.
The documents come into the Williamsburg facility in boxes containing more than 1,000 pages of documents each.
For each file, Datatrac is processing, there will also be related files, which will have to be scanned.
“Let’s say I’m an immigrant filing for my green card today,” Ley said noting that while that application is processed, he would have to have a different government card that would allow him to do work in the country and stay legally.
“There could be several receipt files associated with this ‘A’ file depending on how long it takes for an application to be processed,” Ley noted.
If the facility becomes permanent, it will be some time before they run out of immigration documents to digitize.
Currently, immigration has about 77,000 million primary files not including their associated files that aren’t digitized with another six million files being added each year.
So what happens to the files after Datatrac scans and digitizes one million documents?
“Great question. We store all of them here right now. Ultimately, we’re not sure what we are going to do with them,” Ley said.
He said the ideas range from having the national archives store them to possibly giving the physical files back to the immigrants.
Ley said numerous people have requested copies of their grandparents’ immigration records for various reasons, including genealogical research.
Employees who scan files may scan in roughly 1,000 pages each day.
Officials cautioned that scanning is only one aspect of the job with some people working in quality control, and others who type in indexes for the records so that the information can easily be referenced through databases.