The Latest on Electronic Recording

The “reject” button on our electronic recording system got a workout today. One customer transmitted nine mortgage discharges to us, but the scanned images left the text of the documents very faded and indistinct, resembling a tenth or eleventh generation photocopy more than the primary permanent image of a land recording office. The variables in these documents – names, addresses, marginal references – all seemed to be in bold print (they were perfectly legible) but I suspect that when these documents were scanned by the submitter, the scanner had some kind of automatic light/dark adjustment activated and the bold print caused the normal print to fade away. Rejecting these documents seemed like a tough call, at first, because the problem wasn’t necessarily a fatal one as would have been the case if the fee was wrong, the document belonged in another registry, or if it was registered land. No, this was a judgment call and it was a close one, but the fact that what we see on the computer screen is the best version of the document we will ever get convinced me that we can only accept high quality scans. As a follow up to last Friday’s post, the ability of a customer to do an up to the minute rundown before submitting time sensitive documents continues to present a challenge. When you come to the registry in person to record, you first stop at a public access computer to do your rundown. Finding nothing of concern, you get in line at the recording counter. At the recording terminal, when the registry clerk enters a name from your document into the grantor index, a pop up box will appear, warning that the same name was entered in the computer within the past hour and identifying the book and page of the document where that name can be found. When this box appears, the registry clerk tells the customer about it and the customer tells us to proceed or to cancel the recording while he investigates further. This works fairly well when the customer is standing across the counter from us (although a disturbingly large number of the people doing recordings don’t have a clue of what we’re talking about). With electronic recording, the same system is in place. The customer can still do a rundown using the Internet rather than our internal public access computers, and the recording terminal will still alert us that the new name was contained in a document recorded within the past hour. The only real difference is that the customer is not standing across the recording counter, but is sitting at his desk hundreds of miles away. Some type of real time chat or instant messaging feature on our computer terminals might allow us to quickly check with the customer, but that doesn’t exist yet and it probably won’t any time soon. Simply rejecting the document won’t work either, since our indexing standards often place common names such as banks and municipalities in the grantor index, thus triggering the pop up warning with some frequency. I’ll keep thinking about this one but, as always, suggestions are welcome.