Technology Committee Meeting

The Registry of Deeds Technology Advisory Committee met yesterday in Boston to discuss several topics. I gave a PowerPoint presentation on the ACS electronic recording system (which we hope to have posted for public viewing on www.lowelldeeds.com early next week). We’ve been testing the system here in Lowell for the past six months and have found it to be a very interesting product that has the potential to revolutionize the way recordings are done in Massachusetts. While the Committee had many questions, two issues predominated the discussion. The first issue dealt with the mechanics of how users will enter names into the system: in a multiple document transaction, all names from all the documents are entered at the same time. The label attached to each name tells the system which document it belongs to. For example, in a sale with a mortgage, the buyer and the borrower on the mortgage are typically the same person. Rather than type the name twice, the system takes whomever you identify as the buyer and makes that name the grantee on the deed and the grantor on the mortgage. Most committee members seemed to think that because of the wide variety of names and documents in a typical transaction, this approach wouldn’t work all that well. The other issue involved the speed with which electronically recorded documents would go on record and the ways by which a submitter could do a final rundown prior to the documents going on record. Nothing final was decided other than to continue testing and discussing the proposed system. Check back tomorrow for a report on another meeting topic – document formatting standards.