Website Woes

Thank you all for your patience with the problems we experienced with our website over this past weekend. As I understand it, a board within the website server which is located in Boston burned out over the weekend. I started receiving emails from customers reporting the problem on Saturday night. In the process, we discovered a flaw in our maintenance procedures: the people who can fix the computer can’t get access to it after hours and the people who can get access to the computer room after hours aren’t the ones who can fix the machine. In the past, the necessary parties have teamed up when confronted with a major outage, but things just didn’t work out this time. On a more optimistic note, we’re formulating plans that will add the rest of our holdings to our computer system which means everything will be available over the Internet, hopefully by the first of the year. All registered land documents have now been scanned and are available electronically. We have just started to experiment with ways of scanning old registered land certificates. Ultimately we want all certificates available electronically, but this must be done carefully and in conjunction with land court. To find the best way of accomplishing this requires some behind the scenes, unofficial, trial and error on our part. As for recorded land, we now have the scanned images of documents recorded in books 1 through 1129 (1855 to 1950) and should have them loaded onto the computer system in early September. Our marginal reference project in which we are entering all pre-computer marginal references in an electronic database is back to book 1100. Once this project is complete, we will switch back to the old grantor and grantee index project in which we’ve made the grantor index from 1950 to 1975 available as an electronic book in the PDF format. We plan to use this same methodology to make all indexes available electronically.