Lowell Deeds

A front page story in today’s Lowell Sun reminds us that an important provision of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) goes into effect tomorrow. This law mandates that “any person who maintains or otherwise possesses consumer information for a business purpose” must destroy this information before it is discarded. The proper way to destroy such information is by “burning, pulverizing or shredding.” FACTA says that “consumer information” includes, but is not limited to “social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, phone numbers, physical address, and e-mail address.” The penalty for violating this law is up to $1000 per violation plus liability to the effected person for his actual damages. Alright, I have to confess that prior to reading today’s newspaper, I had never heard of this and, if you’re a regular blog reader, you know that I try to stay up to date on these type of privacy matters. (If I had heard of it before today, I might have bought some stock in a shredder company). What are the practical implications of this law? If a “consumer” sends us a letter at the registry and the envelope bears the consumer’s name and physical address (i.e., his home address), I can no longer just throw that envelope in the trash: I have to “burn, pulverize or shred” it. Same thing with an in-bound e-mail that contains the sender’s e-mail address. If I print it, I can’t throw it away without shredding it first. A long, long time ago in a prior career, I was a “top secret document custodian” and it was a tough job. Everything had to be shredded and then the shredded paper had to be burned. It took a significant amount of effort just to throw something away. As of tomorrow, it seems that all of us will have to put a similar amount of effort into destroying papers that we have always just thrown in the trash. For the record, the registry bought its first shredder more than a year ago to handle employee-related paperwork that was to be thrown away. It looks like the usage of this machine will be increasing significantly.

For about an hour early this morning the sky was blue and what we used to know as the sun popped up over the horizon, but that window slammed shut and our normal gray sky has returned. Yesterday’s blog entry listed the top ten milestones in the past decade’s technological evolution of the registry. Change continues and today will take a glimpse at the future. We’re making a major push this summer to convert the remainder of our records to an electronic format. One ongoing project – scanning the 200,000 or so original registered land documents that reach back to 1898 when the Land Court came into existence – will probably be done by the Fourth of July. We have also started to receive CDs with the images of documents contained in record books 1 through 1129 from the company the Secretary of State’s office hired to convert registry microfilm to images. I’m not sure how quickly these images will be integrated into the ACS system, but we’ll find a way to make them available both in the registry and online. The important things is that they now exist in an electronic format. This means all document images from 1855 – the year the Middlesex North Registry opened – to the present will be available electronically. Next, we come to the recorded land indexes. Our searchable index only goes back to 1976, but earlier this year we had a major breakthrough when we were able to present older indexes in an “electronic book” format on CDs. It’s not the perfect solution, but it works and it’s completely affordable. Right now, we have everything from 1950 to 1975 available in this way. After Labor Day, we’ll probably shift back to this project and move back in time, adding additional Grantor Indexes and perhaps starting Grantee Indexes, as well. Then there’s the marginal reference project. You see, when we convert microfilm of documents to electronic images, we’re working with film that was shot right after the record book was created, so anything added to the book – marginal references – would not appear on the film. Consequently, those electronic images are not as useful as the books which do contain the marginal references. To resolve this discrepancy, we’ve been going through our older record books, page by page, and entering all marginal references into a database. Eventually, this data will be imported into the ACS system, but in the short term, we will be producing lists that will work like this: say you’re interested in a mortgage that’s recorded at book 1250, page 5, you’d just look for that book and page number in our marginal reference list and any book and page numbers that were written as marginal references on that particular page will be shown. Again, it’s not perfect, but it will work. Anyway, there are a few other projects on the drawing board – scanning registered land certificates, electronic recording, geographic information systems – but time and space dictate they’ll have to wait until next week. Enjoy Memorial Day.

The real estate market may be slipping, but there’s still plenty going on at the registry of deeds. June will be a very busy month behind the scenes with a variety of projects, papers and presentations all coming due. While preparing one of these earlier today I began listing the major events that have shaped the registry during the past ten years. Here’s my list, roughly in chronological order but without any comment or analysis. That will have to come later. (1) creating a Customer Service Department where all incoming calls, mail, and walk-in customers make their first contact with the registry; (2) completing the “10 year index” project, which added grantor index entries from 1976 to 1986 to the Wang computer system; (3) the state legislature abolished insolvent Middlesex County, making the registry of deeds a division of the Secretary of State’s office; (4) with a nearly limitless source of funding for Y2K preparations, we not only made our increasingly obsolete Wang computer system Y2K compliant, but we also added state of the art servers, cabling, and a variety of scanners, printers and computers that formed the backbone of today’s registry, (5) we hired a company to scan microfilm of all documents recorded since 1950, giving us 50 years worth of document images on our computer system; (6) we launched lowelldeeds.com, an interactive website that gave users access to all document images over the Internet at no charge; (7) the Registers of Deeds Association adopted Massachusetts Deed Indexing Standards; (8) we installed the ACS computer system, successfully converting all our old proprietary format Wang data; (9) we established a link to masslandrecords.com, the state’s website for land records which is instantly updated with new recordings and which has revolutionized the way customers use the registry; (10) we converted our Grantor Indexes from 1951 to 1976 into electronic books and distributed them on CDs, giving us 55 years of Grantor Index coverage. There are many more, but ten seems

The people at the Suffolk Registry of Deeds have been kind enough to lend us two document scanners for the next few months. The plan is to use these to scan old registered land certificates. The certificates are an unusual size and do not fit in most scanners. The “Suffolk” scanners have an automatic feed which is slightly larger most and duplex capability. The larger feed will physically accept our registered land certificates. Although we have not tested the image “capture size”. Using summer interns we hope to make quick strides on the project. After the first few weeks we will set goals and an estimated completion date. Stay tuned.

Dodging the incessant rain showers this past weekend, I went for a walk through my Lowell neighborhood and observed that For Sale signs were nearly as common as dandelions on front lawns. My guess is that there’s no great increase in the number of properties that are being placed on the market but that the homes that are for sale are staying on the market for much longer. Just last week, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that the red-hot housing market is unsustainable. Greenspan hesitated to call it a national bubble (that presumably could burst). Instead, he used the word “froth” to describe the numerous “local bubbles” around the country. He also said that since prices have increased so much, only those who purchase just before the inevitable downslide begins will be harmed. The economist Paul Krugman presented a bleaker picture, however, asserting that the low interest rates that are sustaining such high real estate prices are kept low by the Chinese government which last year bought $200 billion worth of dollars and this year is on track to buy $300 billion – that’s BILLION. Krugman argues that should China take all of its money elsewhere, the ever increasing US budget deficit will cause interest rates to skyrocket with dire consequences for many new homeowners. Sounds ominous. On the other hand, if it would ever stop raining maybe home buyers will venture out and get house sales moving again.

Last week, while preparing old registered land documents for scanning, registry employees found portions of several newspapers from 1937 & 1938 (The Lowell Sun, The Lowell Sunday Telegram, The Lowell Courier Citizen and The Lowell Evening Leader). The newspapers were recorded by Lowell Tax Collector, Albert Blazon as exhibits to documents recorded for non-payment of taxes. Of course, the papers are filled with fascinating news items and advertisements. It would take many blog entries to list them all…so I have selected a few of the more interesting onesto mention:

This week at the Strand Theatre (or should I say June 5, 1937)- Claudette Colbert stars with Robert Young in I Met Him In Paris.

Don’t like the movies? You can go to the “Ward One Bingo Night” at the Memorial Auditorium (that’s if you can afford it)…admission $.40 cents.

Hungry? The Rex is offering a Southern Fried Chicken Dinner…complete… you get corn fed chicken, soup, tomato juice, fresh rolls, potato croquettes and dessert…all for $.50cents…(to tell the truth…I think this is a better deal than the Bingo Night).

The papers have numerous comic strips: “Tarzan”, “Neighborly Neighbors”, “Dickie Dare”, “Big Sister”…(nope, “Charlie Brown” wasn’t born yet).

Another article gives the details of a Lowell Commercial College social held at Vesper Country Club. Among those in attendance was the Honorable Mayor Dewey Archambault.

I love this headline from 1938…“Pedestrians Urged To Use More Care”…(hey, what about the drivers?).

On a more serious note… one of the papers contains an article concerning the Mayor of New York City, who apparently said something “hateful about the ruler of Germany”. The remark infuriated the ruler (whose name is never mentioned) and an apology is demanded of the US government, which appears to have been given.

As the weeks go on we will probably re-visit these newspapers…fun stuff. By the way in case you were wondering…June 5, 1937 was a Saturday.

Yesterday I traveled to Greenfield to attend a Registered Land Seminar organized by Franklin County Register of Deeds Peter Wood and his staff. The featured speaker was Ed Williams, the Chief Title Examiner of the Land Court. Representatives from each of the 21 registries of deeds in Massachusetts attended. Participants had submitted questions in advance and the program consisted of Attorney Williams addressing each of those questions in detail. Because the participants were almost exclusively registry employees who work in their respective registered land sections, the questions were all involved practical, real world issues. Ed did a fantastic job of responding. He certainly demonstrated incredible physical stamina by staying “on stage for almost five straight hours” which had to be an exhausting experience. And the content of his answers were informative and extremely helpful. The topics discussed are too numerous to mention right here, but we all took extensive notes. In the near future, we plan to compile these notes into a brief document that might serve as a supplement to the current Land Court Guidelines. I’ll certainly be returning to this topic in future postings, so please check back if this area is of interest to you.

The National Association of Realtors is attempting to head off challenges from web-based real estate sale sites. The Realtors want to enact a rule that would allow a brokerage that belongs to the Multiple Listing Service to bar other MLS members from putting their listings on the web. This change would allow a brokerage to decide which realtors could sell their listings on the Internet and which could not. The proposal has been in the works for two years. The United States Justice Department does not agree with the trade organization. The Feds have threatened an antitrust lawsuit to block the rule. Recently, lawyers for the federal government and the NAR meet to try and work out a compromise. According to the Wall Street Journal …Laurie Janik, general counsel for the group said, “it is likely that the Realtors will offer to remove the provision for selective exclusion. In that case an MLS member would have the choice of allowing all other members to display the information or blocking all of them from doing so”. At issue is the rise of discount brokerages that rely heavily on the MLS and the Internet to service customers. Because their costs are lower they charge a lower commission posing a threat for the larger more traditional companies.

I traveled to Beacon Hill today to join Lowell State Representative Kevin Murphy in testifying in favor of a bill he filed that would clarify two glaring ambiguities that exist in the current homestead statue. The first is whether a mortgage automatically terminates an existing homestead. We’ve been through this before, but for our new readers, here’s the issue: an existing homestead is automatically terminated by a deed. In Massachusetts, a mortgage is technically a deed. Therefore, the mortgage might-does-will terminate the homestead. For every lawyer I find who agrees with the foregoing, I find another who reaches the opposite conclusion. Hence the need for legislative clarification. The second ambiguity involves homesteads filed by spouses. Under current law, if the spouses are 62 or older, they both (each?) can file a homestead, but if they are not yet 62, only one spouse may file it. And if they do both file, can they “stack” the coverage provided by the homestead thereby achieving a total equity exemption of $1 million. Although a recent bankruptcy court ruling said you can’t stack homesteads, this area is very ambiguous, as well. Rep Murphy’s bill would allow all spouses to declare a homestead and would also allow reciprocal spousal homesteads to provide double the exemption amount. Although the Judiciary Committee certainly had much on its plate at today’s hearing, they did seem to give this bill their full attention. We will follow it as it moves through the legislative process. On another note, tomorrow I travel to Greenfield to attend a Registered Land seminar sponsored by the Franklin County Registry of Deeds. I’ll post a full report on the seminar in this Thursday’s post.

This morning I had the unique opportunity to talk with Robert Cox, President of the Media Bloggers Association. You may remember last week I wrote about a blogger’s convention run by Cox in Nashville. This morning I asked Cox if he envisioned blogs as the next generation of newspapers as some have speculated. Cox said he believes that most major newspapers will actually enter the blogging arena themselves. Cox may be right on with his supposition. Just a couple of days ago reports came out that the New York Times was considering launching a blog. He also felt that blogs would seriously influence hyper-local citizen’s media. Hyper-Local Citizen’s Media (what the heck is that?) These are information websites that are written by “citizens” about local issues. The best restaurants in town, the selection of the new high school principal, discussion about a community’s budget, these are typical topics presented on a hyper-local site. Cox also discussed the audio-blog and its big brother the Podcast. He sees these as competitor of satellite radio. I told him I was overwhelmed with the twists and turns that information mediums were taking…after the conversation I asked my self… I am getting old?

We’ve written about podcasting before and since it is an emerging technological trend, we’re writing about it again. The word “podcast” emanates from Apple’s iPod music player but it does not require an iPod to participate. The term podcasting describes the act of recording an audio file on your computer and then posting it on the Internet so that others may listen to it. They can download it to an iPod and listen to it as they would music, or they can listen to it right on their computer as it streams from the Internet. The attraction of podcasting is that for very little money and time, anyone can create the equivalent of a radio program about any topic imaginable. While podcasts certainly don’t have the reach of 50,000 watt WBZ radio, they do allow a type of very precise specialization that would never work for commercial radio. We’ve experimented with a type of podcasting with our short audio snippets about the registry, but full scale podcasting may not be far behind. In the meantime, here are some online directories with links to thousands of podcasts. We haven’t screened everyone of them so we’re not attesting to the quality or content, but it might we worth exploring if you have a chance.
Podcast.net (www.podcast.net) - Podcasting News (podcastingnews.com) - Podcast Alley (www.podcastalley.com) and iPodder.org (www.ipodder.org).

Back in 1999 we explored the role that a Geographic Information System might play at the registry of deeds. A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer system “capable of storing, manipulating, and displaying geographically referenced information” such as boundary lines, roads, waterways, zoning districts, wetlands and any thing else that can be depicted on a map. As the primary repository of all documents related to land ownership, the registry of deeds certainly has a role to play in any GIS. Six years ago, the technology (fast computers and readily available high speed Internet connections, for example) and the inventory of electronically based data, documents and map images were insufficient to support such a system for anything beyond simple demonstrations. Well as you all know, computer technology changes rapidly and in the tech field, six years is an eternity, so we are revisiting the entire GIS concept. As much by coincidence as by design, we have made contact with MassGIS, the Commonwealth’s office of Geographic and Environmental Information and learned of the tremendous strides that office has made in making a GIS system that other systems – such as a registry of deeds – can plug into to greatly enhance the quality of data we make available to the customers of both the registry and of MassGIS (http://www.mass.gov/mgis/massgis.htm). Imagine using our website to view legal documents about a particular parcel and then, with a simple click of an on-screen link, going directly to an over head photograph of that parcel with the applicable lot lines and road layouts overlaid on the photograph. The easy-to-use MassGIS interface would then permit you to overlay zoning districts, wetlands delineations, the location of schools, police and fire stations and just about any other type of information that can be depicted on the map. For now, we’re experimenting with different concepts to try to decide what works best.

The increase in the number and significance of blogs is historic. Categorizing the event as historic is not an exaggeration. Blogs have forever changing the information world, as we know it. According to Jay Rosen, well-known press critic and writer, during the horrific tsunami disaster bloggers actually beat big Journalism at its own game. Last month at a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, long time news journalist Sam Donaldson made a statement that shocked his audience. “We’re going out of the network news business”, Donaldson told his audience “The old days…are going thanks to changing technology”. At the same convention Jeff Greenfield, a senior analyst with CNN, said blogs are rapidly changing the face of journalism. There is no doubt both print and television news are feeling the awesome effects of the Internet. They offer the public quick, large-scale avenues to read about stories usually covered by traditional news outlets. Last week in New Jersey there was a convention of the “Media Bloggers Association. One of the main topics of discussion was journalistic standards for bloggers. For many, blogging is simply an informal “express yourself” tool, but for others it has become a serious means of communicating news. There are many that believe print news is destined for extinction or evolution into some electronic medium like blogs …but… I won’t my breath waiting for the Middlesex North Times

Today’s Globe has a fascinating front page story that explains the arrest of a man who allegedly stole more than $400,000 from numerous bank accounts. How did he get the money? By withdrawing it from ATM machines with duplicate ATM cards. According to the police, this scheme is called “skimming.” Here’s how it worked. The criminal obtained a magnetic strip reader, a relatively common device available for less than $1000 on eBay. He would then mount this device at the ATM’s location, either at the entry door that requires users to swipe their cards to gain access or somewhere on top or in front of the real card reader. In either case, unwary bank customers would swipe their ATM cards, allowing the bogus card reader to capture and store the information encoded on the magnetic strip of the real card. The perpetrator would also mount a tiny video camera near the ATM keypad. This would transmit video of the customer poking his PIN number into the ATM’s keypad back to the criminal’s notebook computer screen. As soon as the customer left, the criminal would retrieve the data from the magnetic card reader, use it to format the magnetic strip on a new card with the same information, then write down the PIN number on a paper sticker attached to a card. Then, either he or an accomplice would go to another ATM and withdraw as much cash as possible from the account. When asked how an individual can defend against this kind of operation, the police had two suggestions. Whenever you use an ATM or any kind of card reader, look for anything suspicious or out of place. If something doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t. The other thing you can do is use your free hand and body to block the view of others as you enter your PIN number. I once saw a report by a police officer who was assigned to a major airport. He explained that one day he saw a nice looking family grouped together while the father filmed them with a video camera. The next day, the same family was in the same place shooting the same video. He grew suspicious, but it was only on the third day of seeing this that he realized that the background for this family portrait was a bank of pay telephones and the video camera was being used to record callers entering their phone credit card numbers which would then be used by others for all types of purposes. Here on the registry blog, we’ve often written about identity theft and its consequences. This story is further evidence that this stuff really does happen, so it’s incumbent on all of us to take it very seriously.

Saturday was the annual “Doors Open Lowell” event. Approximately thirty people visited the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds despite the soggy weather. There were even people who came from Boston and Springfield to visit the historic buildings of Lowell. Register of Deeds Dick Howe gave tours of the Superior Courthouse and Registry. Interesting display panels dealing with various topics related to Middlesex North communities were available for public view as well. Over the years the registry developed these panels to commemorate important events in history. Display panel topics included: the role of the Middlesex North communities in the battle of April 19, 1775; the Irish in Lowell with a recently discovered map of “Paddy Camp Lands”; black history month and various deeds of interest including Lowell’s own Jack Kerouac. In addition visits viewed a video slide show, which included unique pictures of the interior and exterior of the Superior Courthouse. One sequence of frames showed close ups pictures of the clock tower and the clocks works. It’s strange when you work in a building… you never really appreciate it. Participating in “Doors Open Lowell” reminded me of the Superior Courthouse’s historical and architectural significance.