Record Books

Even though we stopped making physical record books in 2001, we still keep track how many "books" we create each year.  In 2013, there were 1102 new books, each consisting of approximately 300 pages.  That adds 330,600 pages to our inventory.

By the end of 2013, we had 27,925 record books containing 9,590,900 pages.  Of those books, 15,482 are virtual books, meaning that they were created after 2001 and never existed in paper form.

Our first book technology was handwritten pages that were sewn together in large format books.  These began with the opening of this registry in 1855 and were used up until 1924.  This format accounted for 702 books.  In 1924, we switched to type written pages that used the same type of binding.  This method continued until 1949 and accounted for 1127 books.  Book pages were printed from microfilm beginning in 1949.  That method continued up until 1995 with the book format moving from the large format to the small white plastic covers.  In 1995, we began printing book pages from scanned images using the same plastic covers.  That continued until 2001 when we stopped printing altogether.

Besides these documents, we also have hundreds of thousands of pages of registered land documents and index pages.  I'll account for them in a future blog post.