Computer Start Date Now Back to 1976

Back in early August (check out the August 5 blog entry) our computer company modified the search program we use in the registry and on the Internet. The purpose of the change was to allow the search to ignore spaces and punctuation, a very desirable situation. Unfortunately, we paid a price for this change. Previously, the search completely ignored the “start date” when retrieving documents by book and page number. This was significant in Lowell where our name index reaches back to 1976, but our images go all the way to 1950. We could leave the default start date as 1976 (accurately reflecting our name index) while still retrieving older document images without changing the start date. With the “start date” field turned on, however, the only way you could retrieve a pre-1976 image would be to manually change the start date to 1950. Since many of our Internet users are not real estate professionals, we have found that simple works best, so we decided to roll the default start date back to 1950 which would allow all images to be retrieved without the user having to modify the date at all. While we realized that pushing the start date back to 1950 might mislead a user into thinking that was the coverage of our name index, we decided to try out the 1950 default date for a limited period during which we would gauge user feedback. We have now decided to return the start date to 1976, the name index start date. This means that if you want to retrieve an older document image by book and page number, you should change the start date to 1950. Sorry this entry got so long, but I wanted to share with all of you the thought process we followed in this situation. This is also an instance where user comments and feedback would have greatly assisted me in how to handle this tricky situation. Unfortunately, the only feedback I received was indirect and second-hand, so this well-intentioned but ill-advised experiment persisted for longer than it should have.