Future Plans

For about an hour early this morning the sky was blue and what we used to know as the sun popped up over the horizon, but that window slammed shut and our normal gray sky has returned. Yesterday’s blog entry listed the top ten milestones in the past decade’s technological evolution of the registry. Change continues and today will take a glimpse at the future. We’re making a major push this summer to convert the remainder of our records to an electronic format. One ongoing project – scanning the 200,000 or so original registered land documents that reach back to 1898 when the Land Court came into existence – will probably be done by the Fourth of July. We have also started to receive CDs with the images of documents contained in record books 1 through 1129 from the company the Secretary of State’s office hired to convert registry microfilm to images. I’m not sure how quickly these images will be integrated into the ACS system, but we’ll find a way to make them available both in the registry and online. The important things is that they now exist in an electronic format. This means all document images from 1855 – the year the Middlesex North Registry opened – to the present will be available electronically. Next, we come to the recorded land indexes. Our searchable index only goes back to 1976, but earlier this year we had a major breakthrough when we were able to present older indexes in an “electronic book” format on CDs. It’s not the perfect solution, but it works and it’s completely affordable. Right now, we have everything from 1950 to 1975 available in this way. After Labor Day, we’ll probably shift back to this project and move back in time, adding additional Grantor Indexes and perhaps starting Grantee Indexes, as well. Then there’s the marginal reference project. You see, when we convert microfilm of documents to electronic images, we’re working with film that was shot right after the record book was created, so anything added to the book – marginal references – would not appear on the film. Consequently, those electronic images are not as useful as the books which do contain the marginal references. To resolve this discrepancy, we’ve been going through our older record books, page by page, and entering all marginal references into a database. Eventually, this data will be imported into the ACS system, but in the short term, we will be producing lists that will work like this: say you’re interested in a mortgage that’s recorded at book 1250, page 5, you’d just look for that book and page number in our marginal reference list and any book and page numbers that were written as marginal references on that particular page will be shown. Again, it’s not perfect, but it will work. Anyway, there are a few other projects on the drawing board – scanning registered land certificates, electronic recording, geographic information systems – but time and space dictate they’ll have to wait until next week. Enjoy Memorial Day.