New mapping project

Along with almost 10 million pages of document images, through the years, this office has recorded close to 30,000 subdivision plans. All of these have been scanned and are available for viewing at the registry and online, but the index that we maintain for finding relevant plans leaves much to be desired. When we record a new plan, we do enter the property owner's name if it is stated (it doesn't have to be) and any street names shown on the plan. Adding the streets is helpful, but if it's a long one, like "Chelmsford Street", there might be close to 100 plans that would be presented in answer to any search for that street.

The surest way to find a plan is by having its "plan book and page" numbers. (Whenever a plan is recorded, it is assigned such ID numbers). Since the property description of most deeds contain the plan book and page number of the plan that shows the lot covered by the deed, that's the way most folks find plan references. But many times there is not an exact reference even though a plan may be mentioned.

In trying to find ways to make it easier to find plans relevant to your parcel, I thought that if we could use an application like Google maps and then position each of our plans as a transparent overlay on top of the portion of the Google map depicted on the plan, it would be very easy for people to find their parcel on the Google map and immediately see which if any subdivision plans existed for that locus. Simple pop-up text boxes could easily display information about the plan and perhaps even the scanned image of the plan itself.

We're just in the exploratory phase now and some technological roadblocks may arise, but I wanted to get the concept out there and see what you thought about it.