Return of the Image Indexers

Next week we will begin our “image indexing” project again. “What’s that?”… you ask.
As you probably are aware our computer holds a searchable name index back to January 1976. If you need to search before that you are stuck using the old grantor/grantee index books. “Image Indexing” solves this problem. First a little history…"fast re-wind 12 years"...registry employees manually entered into the Wang Computer System the entries for the 1976-85 index …one by one by one by one…this was an incredibly time consuming project...We asked ourselves...how do we make the earlier indexes electronicly available to the public without getting into a manmoth project?...We investigated out-sourcing the work, but it was far too expensive. Last September we began a very successful “indexing imaging” project. This project allowed us to provide pages of the old indexes to the public on CD. The project lasted for several months during which we created CD’s for the 1960-1965 and 1966-1975 indexes. The process is simple and far less time consuming than entering individual entries as was done in the days of yore. All of our old index books have been microfilmed for disaster recovery purposes. About four years ago employees scanned this microfilm. We used these scanned images of the existing paper index books to create the CD’s. Usually these images are quite clear and readable, but they contain a lot of extraneous marks (wide margins, portions of facing pages etc). To improve the quality we had people cropping and cleaning the edges of the images. Employees were assigned an individual letter from the index. As it was finished an Adobe PDF file was created. This file contained all of the pages with entries that start with that letter plus a table of contents used to locate the needed page..."fast-wind to today"... The second phase of “image indexing” will begin on Monday starting with the 1941-1950 Grantor index..."fast forward six months"... The long-range plan is to make all indexes back to 1855 available on CD…And of course, these indexes will be made available to the public free.