Historical Perspective

Yesterday I “revisited” a bar graph I created a number of months ago comparing document totals for the past twenty-five years. No question… 2003 was a record breaker. That year the registry recorded 146,956 documents. As I considered these yearly totals I thought it might be interesting to list some significant registry events with the yearly total:

1986- The Wang computer system wasn’t installed in the registry until September of 1987. This means that in 1986 (the highpoint of the 80’s real estate boom) employees recorded 82,575 documents “by hand”.

1994- The first imaging system was installed in the registry in 1994. 71,427 documents were recorded that year. Interesting fact…with the new imaging system computer responsibilities and document flow were not completely establish in 1994 so the MIS director scanned all documents himself.

1995- Register Howe took office. The registry recorded 60,681 documents that year, less than half of what was recorded in 2003(146,956).

1997- The Massachusetts legislature abolished Middlesex County. That year 70,128 documents were recorded. That July Middlesex North was placed in the office of the Secretary of State.

1999-Thank you Y2K…because of the dreaded “Y2K” bug the Wang computer system was convert to work on a window’s based system called “lightspeed”…and new servers with large memory capacity were installed in the registry. This made it possible for us to scan and store 55 years of images. While "teams" of computer experts upgraded our system, the staff recorded 89,506 documents.

2001- The ACS computer system was installed. That year began the incredible rise in documents... 2001-97,180... 2002-115,890... and finally 2003 a historic 146,6956. The ACS system provided us advantages that allowed us to handled 2003 in stride.