By Richard P.
Howe Jr.
Just before
Memorial Day 2002, a team from a computer company called ACS arrived in Lowell
to begin the first-ever Massachusetts installation of the 20/20 land management
computer application.
The Middlesex North installation went
live on July 1, 2002, and remains in use today. With periodic upgrades, 20/20 is
still a reliable system but much has changed in the world of computers over the
past 16 years. The time has come to replace 20/20 with a new system built with
the latest features and capabilities. The formal selection process has yet to
begin but our plan is to make the choice and begin deployment in 2019.
The new system
will perform all existing computer tasks better and faster and will add even
more capabilities. Here are some of the features I expect to be included.
Full Text Search. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an old technology that
keeps getting better. OCR converts the print in a digital image into searchable
text. Google has scanned millions of books, run the resulting images through
OCR, and now makes the content of those books fully searchable. The same can be
done with recorded documents. By running record book images through an OCR
program, we can make the full text of all documents – the typewritten ones, at
least – fully searchable. This would not replace our index but would supplement
it, adding a new and powerful search tool for those who use land records.
Index Verification. Having an accurate index is
essential to the registry of deeds. The 20/20 system uses a process called
“blind rekey verification” which works as follows: At the point of recording,
one employee types information from the document into the various fields of the
index. Later, a second employee “verifies” those entries by viewing the
document and retyping all the index entries without ever seeing what the first
employee typed. If both entries match, that document is verified and the
process is repeated for the next document. If there is a discrepancy, the
verifier can view the original entries and then decide whether to restore them
or keep the new values. Although rekey verification is more time consuming than
visual verification (something we all call proofreading), it is also thought to
be more accurate.
I believe
technology is changing that calculation. With electronic recording, which
accounts for a majority of all documents recorded at this registry, the
customer makes all index entries and the registry clerk processing the document
verifies those entries when the document first arrives. To have another
registry employee then retype those same entries to verify them a second time
seems unnecessary or at least inefficient.
Beyond that, OCR also
has a place in index verification. The OCR application can detect names and
numbers from the recorded document image, convert them to text and then compare
that text to the values entered into the index by the registry employee (with
walk-in recording) or the customer (with electronic recording). This
verification-by-computer will ensure a high degree of accuracy in the spelling
of names. But there is a qualitative aspect to verification – determining the
proper document type, for instance – that will still require human judgment.
And in those qualitative decisions, it is better that the employee doing the
verification actually see what the first employee entered. For these reasons, I
believe that the new system should move away from blind rekey verification to a
more basic visual verification method operating in tandem with OCR verification.
Standard
Searches Across Platforms. The 20/20 system employs two
different search applications: one available at the registry of deeds and the
other online. Although they pull from the same data and yield the same results,
they look and respond differently. As more and more people use the website for
their research rather than doing it at the registry, this has become less of a
problem. Nevertheless, there should be a single search system and that system
should work well on tablets and cell phones.
Hyperlinks.
Long before anyone had heard the term hyperlink,
the registry of deeds was using them. They were called marginal references. The
20/20 system has an automated marginal reference feature that works well but a
new system could do better. For instance, a deed should have a link to the
recorded plan that depicts the lot conveyed by the deed which would allow the
user to quickly toggle between the deed and the plan or show both
simultaneously. The new system will have this capability; 20/20 does not.
This list is far from
exhaustive but it offers some ideas on how a new system might change the way
registries of deeds operate. Still, the most important characteristic for a new
registry computer system to have would be the flexibility to adapt to
technological change that never stops.
Dick
Howe’s column, “From the Recording Desk...,” is a regular feature of REBA
News. Dick has served as register of
deeds in the Middlesex North Registry since 1995. He is a frequent commentator on land records
issues and real estate news. Dick can be
contacted by email at richard.howe@sec.state.ma.us.
