LowellDeeds

A lengthy and interesting telephone conversation with a lawyer earlier today got me thinking about indexing standards. A big part of our discussion was how the registry and our computer handle last names that contain spaces (De La Maya) or punctuation marks (O'Brien). According to the indexing standards, spaces and punctuation marks are omitted, so De La Maya would be indexed as DELAMAYA and O'Brien as OBRIEN. It is crucial that the registry follows these standards, otherwise users conducting searches might miss a document. For example, if you conduct your search in accordance with the Indexing Standards and enter OBRIEN, but we've kept the apostrophe when we put the name in the index (O'BRIEN), the entry with the apostrophe will not appear. Out of curiosity, I did a search for O' which would find any name in our index that started with the letter O and was followed by an apostrophe and then other letters. I'm embarrassed to say that I found several dozen. We'll address that with our employees first thing in the morning and will correct the index entries by removing the apostrophes from the database. Of course, any time we make such a change, we keep a precise record of what we changed and when we changed it in case any questions arise. I now want to conduct an extensive review of our index to discover any other instances where we are not complying with the Indexing Standards. If you care about this (and if you've bothered to read this far, you probably do), I'd really appreciate it if you would send me an email with names that tend to cause these types of problems so I can put them on a type of "watch list" for regular checking in the future.