LowellDeeds

Today the ACS users group (which consists of representatives of the five registries now using the ACS system, folks from the Secretary of State's Office, and key ACS employees) met in Northampton. Nothing earth shattering occurred, but I always welcome a chance to visit Northampton which has a lively, interesting downtown. One item that generated some heat involved the use of standardized document codes. Last fall, this users group developed a standard set of document codes that would eventually be used by all five registries. The registries that switched to the new codes back on January 2 are upset that others (like Lowell) have not yet made the switch. The reason I'm in no rush to start using these new codes is that they will inject a large amount of uncertainty into the index if not handled correctly. For example, let's say the old code for mortgage was MTG and the new one is MORT. If we were to simply start using the new codes, the old documents would remain as MTGs, the newer ones as MORTs. When you do your search, what do you look for? Unless you do two searches, one for each document type, you're likely to miss something. The proper way to make this change is to convert the old document types so they're identical to the new. But such a conversion is a complex operation that requires significant testing and experimentation. Once we are finished that phase, we will convert our existing document codes to the new ones and then make the switch to the new codes for all future documents. Sorry to plunge into so much detail about this, but moving fast on this simply for the sake of moving fast creates an unreasonable risk of a mix up by you, the person examining the title - and we certainly don't want to cause that to happen. We'll keep you posted.