Saturday, March 13, 2004

We're about to add a significant amount of new information to the registry's computer system. Although documents recorded between 1976 and 1987 have an index that allows you to search by name and address, that index does not have book and page numbers in the marginal reference field. This prevents users from easily seeing related documents. Since the document images for those (and earlier) years were obtained from microfilm that was created right after the documents were recorded, marginal references that were written in the margin of the record books are not captured on the electronic images either. To solve this omission, registry employees have spent the last few months going through thousands of record books, page-by-page, and entering all marginal references into a computerized database. After some testing, we will import this data into our computer system. Once that's done, the marginal reference links for pre-1987 index entries will be operational.

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