Registry records on Google Books?

This past Monday I attended a meeting in Boston with most of my register of deeds colleagues to discuss technology. Electronic recording and the cost of storing archival microfilm were two big topics, but Greg, the IT guy from the registry in Springfield, said something that got me thinking about new ways to use existing technology.

when Hampden County was abolished as a governmental entity, the registry of deeds inherited records from the county agencies that were going away - like the county commissioners and the engineers. The registry recently scanned old books containing meeting minutes of county government and succeeded in sharing the resulting digital images with Google Books.

Google Books is a great (and free) service whereby Google has scanned millions of pages of out-of-copyright books and made the images freely available online. What's especially nice about Google Books is the service's ability to search for a word or words within the digital text of a scanned image.

This type of software has amazing implications for registries of deeds. Imagine seeking a deed from 1938 to Richard Howe for property at 360 Gorham Street. Using software like that on Google Books, you could perform a search for the words "Howe" and "Gorham" and the computer would scan through all of our images, locating every one that contained those two words. I'm not advocating the replacement of the grantor and grantee indexes. They will still be vital to the performance of a traditional title exam, but many of our users, particularly those interested in history or genealogy would greatly benefit from such a simple, stream-lined way of finding documents.