Registered Land Developments

We've started the planning process for scanning all of our registered land certificates of title and memoranda of encumbrances. Certificates created since July 2002 all exist on paper and on the computer system, but all earlier ones really only exist in the books maintained in the registered land department. Historically, these books have been updated on a daily basis. As new documents get recorded, annotations are made on the appropriate certificates. There are two reasons we should scan these books. First, that will make the contents of the books readily available on our computers and the Internet. Second, there is no real backup for these books. If we ever had a fire at the registry and these were destroys, there's no ready replacement. I guess the theory is that we could recontruct all of these certificates and encumbrances from the recorded documents (they are all backed up off site on microfilm), but that would be a near impossible task.