ACS Group was awarded a competitive bid to design and develop a custom database application to manage and track public records for the most populous County in Washington State. When the Director of Archives contacted ACS Group regarding the need to develop a system for managing their archive records, the information currently being collected and stored existed in four separate databases. ACS Group engineered a single database structure that contained all of the elements and entities needed to handle both the transfer of legacy data from the disparate databases as well as incorporating changes required as part of the specifications for the new system.One of the requirements for the new system was the creation of a data retrieval system for archival records based on the use of a thesaurus. The use of a thesaurus in archival searches is based on hierarchical relationships between key words and various data groupings and categories. Representing hierarchical relationships in a relational database is never easy, however ACS Group developers through the use of tree views constructed an interface that provided a hierarchical window into the data for searching and retrieving information. The new database system incorporating both old and new improved access to data and increased staff’s ability to respond to questions regarding the County’s public records.