Lowell Deeds

The www.lowelldeeds.com site has been inaccessible for most of today. We can reach the site through our internal network and it’s working OK by that route, so that tells us that the server that hosts the site is working OK and that the problem is with its connection to the outside world. A number of technical people are working on it. If you’re able to read this, it means the problem has been fixed, at least temporarily. As a long term solution, we’re in the process of transferring our website to a more reliable setup. Unfortunately, since that is a major change, it will take some time to get it done. In the meantime, we will continue troubleshooting the existing setup.

We’re in the process of modifying this blog to add more features, especially the ability for users to post comments. Overall the site will be more interactive and may have guest columnists. In other web-related developments, we’re still trying to track down the cause of the problems that users have experienced accessing www.lowelldeeds.com. The company that provides our communications link to the internet tested its lines last night and found no problems so we’re still searching for the cause. We also continue to work on the index image program that will make all pre-1976 indexes available online. The initial version that we’ve been testing is very promising and we hope to have a workable version online by mid-September.

www.lowelldeeds.com continues to have some problems. The work we performed on our computer system last night confirmed that the problem is not with the computer server that hosts the website. That leaves the line that connects it with the internet as the most likely culprit. We’ve been advising people who call to report problems to use www.masslandrecords.com if the site. We have some long term changes planned for the mechanics of the website - nothing that will be noticeable to users except, perhaps, for more reliable performance.

A frequent question asked by our customers is “when will the electronic versions of the pre-1976 indexes be available online?” Since April 1, 2008, such an application has been available on the computers at the registry (that’s the date that we took all paper books including old indexes out of public circulation). The in-house app, however, combines hundreds and sometimes thousands of images into single PDF formatted files. While they’re easy to use on the registry’s internal computer network, the files are too large to use efficiently online even with high speed cable or DSL connections. So to make a practical online version, we need something that will yield a much smaller group of pages, those pages grouped around the name that you’re searching. We received a prototype of this application several weeks ago and have been testing it ever since. The application shows much promise but there are some programming tweaks that must be made. I’m hopeful that an operational version will be available on our website in early September. For now, thought, you can catch a glimpse of the product as it stands today. The search page asks you to select the date range and index you wish to search then you enter the first and last name of the party. That returns a link with the first and last name on a particular page. Clicking on that link displays the page. The final version will return a group of pages that bracket the one with your name on it so you can quickly paginate forward and backward. We’ll share more news about this program as it becomes available but for now, here are some screen shots of what we’ve been testing.

The June sales and foreclosure reports and the 2008 reports to date (January 1 thru June 30) are now available online.

Since April 1 and the rollout of our pre-1976 indexes on our in-house computer system, many customers have asked us when they might expect these indexes to be available on the internet. The files we are using on the internal network are huge with each file eoncompassing 1000 or more separate images, so it would be useless to just place them on our website: your computer would time out before you could download one of them. We’ve known that for a while and have explored different (more streamlined) methods of presenting this information that would be more suitable to internet hosting. After several false starts, it looks like we have found a programmer who can make this happen. Our expected delivery date for this new application is June 30, 2008, just about seven weeks away and right in time for the really sticky weather that makes this old, only partially air conditioned building a difficult place to spend the summer.

The ACS User Group - the collection of Massachusetts registries of deeds that use the ACS computer system - met this morning in Worcester. From my perspective, the biggest news to emerge from the meeting was that the new MassLandRecords website will be delivered to the Secretary of State’s office for testing within the next two weeks. MassLandRecords is the central website that houses the online data and images of the registries that use the ACS system. It has recently been plagued with complaints of slow performance but this new version should fix that and many other issues. The existing site was designed in the late 1990s using the best available technology and while it still works, it was never intended to handle the huge volume of traffic that the site now sees. This new version, in addition to resempling the in-registry public search system, is also built using the latest and most reliable internet applications and should provide greatly improved performance. Assuming that there are no glitches, the new version should be fully rolled out to the public late this summer.

Index information from 1976 to the present is available in a searchable database on public access computers in the registry and remotely via the internet. Earlier indexes will soon be available in a different way. Some time ago, we scanned all of the pre-1976 indexes for disaster recovery purposes – they had never been microfilmed – and the resulting images were quite good. So good, in fact, that we completely changed our approach to adding index information to our computer system. Rather than spend thousands of hours (or dollars) doing data entry, we decided instead to present the scanned images of the existing paper indexes as electronic books. After all, back when we produced a current index on paper as well as on the computer, registry users would often say that they preferred the paper version because it allowed them to flip forward and back through the pages, potentially catching spelling variations that would otherwise be missed on the more precise database search.

Here’s how these “electronic index books” work. We have duplicated the Grantor-Grantee and date range divisions that existed in the paper books. For example, there are ten sets of books divided into the following year groupings: 1639-1855; 1855-1880; 1881-1900; 1901-1915; 1916-1925; 1926-1940; 1941-1950; 1951-1960; 1961-1965; 1966-1975. Within each of these date ranges, we have taken all the images containing names that begin with the letter “A” for example, and bundled them into a single PDF file. Since some of these files may contain 800 or more images/pages, they are quite large and cannot be made available over the internet in their current form (but more on that later). To assist users in finding the relevant entries, we have created a table of contents consisting of the first name on every page and the corresponding page number. To illustrate, let’s say you’re interested in Grantee Index entries for “Richard Howe” in the 1940s. After navigating your way through the Grantee folder to the 1941-1950 folder, to the letter “H” folder, you would peruse the table of contents looking for that name. You see that the closest name that alphabetically precedes it is “Raymond Howe” on page 581 and that the first name on the next page (582) is “Samuel Howe.” Using the “go to page” feature in the Adobe PDF viewer, you enter “581” and are immediately forwarded to that page. You view the page just as you would view that page in the paper index book. If you want to flip backwards or forwards, you use the “next” and “previous” page arrows to do it. It’s as simple as that. When you find an entry of interest, you just jot down the book and page on your legal pad, just as you do with the paper index, and then use the appropriate computer application to display the image of that book and page. That’s how it all works.

We’ve made these PDF files to our customers on CD for several years now, providing them on a barter system that requires the customer to provide us with a set of blank CDs which we swap with CDs containing these PDF files. Registry employees have used them for years on our internal network, rarely having to look at paper index books. On April 1, 2008 when we make the leap to the entirely paperless registry, these PDF files will be available on most public access terminals within the registry. Users will find this method of viewing our pre-1976 indexes superior to the current method. As for offsite access to this data, we’re working with a computer consultant to devise a simple application that will work on the internet, but that’s still a few months away.

We’ve made some changes to www.lowelldeeds.com. Besides changing the appearance of it, we have added a “marginal reference lookup” capability. We spent several years entering all marginal references from book 1 through book 4216 (which is in 1987) into a database. Using the lookup link, you enter the book and page of the beginning document and click “find marginal references” and the screen will display the book, page number and document type of any reference that was written in the margin of that book. All references later than 1987 exist as hyperlinks in our main database. We have also made images of our Middlesex South books - those containing documents for the towns in this district recorded prior to 1855 - available online. To retrieve them, you must know the town, the book and the page number. Finally, we’ve put the images of all documents from book 1 to book 2789 in the “record book” link. But we will soon add higher numbered books that for whatever reason do not appear as images in our main database. We have already scanned them and stored them locally, but importing them into the ACS system has been problematic. This will provide a short term solution. Please send me an email if you have any comments about the new design and the new functionality.

Last night I finished a “web design” class that gave me many pointers on how to improve lowelldeeds.com, so I’m about to begin a redesign that will hopefully be easier to use and filled with more information. Rather than wait a month until the new version is completely finished, we might roll out new features as they are ready and then bring it all together at the end. As always, stay tuned to this blog for details.

In addition, I also got a glimpse yesterday at a proposed new version of masslandrecords.com. The registers from the registries that use the ACS system (like we do), met with ACS almost a year ago and presented a comparison of the in-registry public search system and the website version. Almost everyone prefers the in-registry system, but for security, cost and reliability reasons, we want to move to an entirely web-based public search application. Before we can do this, we have to get the website functioning more like the in-registry software. I think this new design does that. I won’t go into the details because, as I said, this was just a prototype and there’s no specific timetable for when it will be fully implemented. But from what I saw, I am quite optimistic.

For some reason on Sunday morning I went to www.masslandrecords.com to look up some property records. The site was down. I reported it to a contact at the Secretary of State’s office who informed the IT folks. I’m not sure when they were able to get to it, but the site came back online yesterday (Monday - the Martin Luther King Day holiday) at about noon. While the site was down, I received a dozen or so emails from what appeared to be first-time users complaining about our “lousy website.” I think our regular users were familiar enough with the workings of our site to know it was a temporary problem, but it was clear that first impressions mean a lot. I replied to each of the emails explaining the situation and sent additional replies yesterday when the site came back online. As for the cause of the outage, it appears to have been a software or programming issue that involved the firewall that protects the database from intruders. While it’s unfortunate we had any outage at all, this type of issue is less worrisome than a major equipment or software failure, neither of which has occurred for several years.

The ACS User Group had a productive meeting in Worcester today. This group consists of folks from the 13 registries of deeds that use the ACS computer system (the one we have in Lowell) along with representatives from ACS and the Secretary of State’s office. Attendees got their first glimpse of the new ACS browser-based search program that has a February 2008 target installation date. If you’ve used the public access terminals in the registry to conduct a search and then performed the same query on the Internet, you will receive the same information but it will be displayed in very different ways. (Most people prefer the in-registry system). This new application takes the best features of the public access terminals and combines them with the flexibility of a web-based system. While the current system will remain available beyond next February, I expect that we will completely remove it from the registry in Lowell and shift entirely to the browser-based search program. That way, whether you use a registry computer, your own wireless enabled laptop at the registry, or your own computer at home, you will utilize the exact same program which will be better for everyone once the initial trauma of losing the comfortable and familiar in-registry system goes away. This new approach has the added benefits of being much easier to install and maintain while greatly strengthening the security of our computer network. This is still a long way off, but what I saw today was impressive.

The www.lowelldeeds.com site was down from about 7 pm last night until about 8:45 this morning. The site that holds most of the land data, www.masslandrecords.com was fine, and I want to remind you to bookmark both of those sites because they are on two different computers in two different places, so if one goes down, it’s likely the other is still working. There was really nothing wrong with the lowelldeeds site, either. The problem occurred when a technician came and performed a routine upgrade to our computer security. Because it deals with security, I won’t get into the details here. When he finished, we thought we had adequately tested it (I was the one who was here with him) but obviously we had not. Traffic from our website out to the rest of the world wasn’t getting out, so when you tried to pull something out you got the standard “site not available” screen on your internet browser. So the good news is that it wasn’t a mechanical failure or something unexplained. We know what happened because we inadvertently caused it. We’re also treating it as a learning experience so we can ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again.

My apologies to all who were inconvenienced by our website being down this weekend. The Lowell site, www.lowelldeeds.com, was operating fine, but the “search land records” link within that page brings you to a completely different site, www.masslandrecords.com, and that’s where the problem occurred. Although our computer provider, ACS, is normally responsible for the website, they were blameless in this matter. It seems that the Secretary of State’s office, the owner of that site, chose to switch to a different Internet Service Provider (ISP). From my own experience in doing that, I would have known that service would have been disrupted for some period of time – usually 24 to 48 hours – so I would have placed a warning well in advance on the website. But I didn’t know anything about this until this morning, after normalcy had resumed. The problem was magnified for us over the weekend because Saturday morning’s Lowell Sun contained an article by Attorney James Horoutunian on the Declaration of Homestead which included his recommendation that homeowners visit www.lowelldeeds.com to look up information about their property. That drove a significant amount of new traffic to our site, but this weekend’s visitors were met with frustration and “server not found” messages. But, as I said, everything should be back to normal now and, if there is any good news to be found here, it’s that the problem was fully explainable and not an unexpected crash of our otherwise reliable website.

Will paper soon join the quill pen and the typewriter in obsolescence when it comes to the operation of the registry of deeds? Recent developments certainly make it seem so. In Lowell, this migration began back in November 1994 with the acquisition of the registry’s first scanner. The few thousand pages of digital images of record books that had accumulated by the end of that year has now grown to nearly ten million. With just a handful of exceptions, all documents recorded since 1855 are now freely available on www.lowelldeeds.com and the number of missing or illegible documents is decreasing every day as registry employees discover and remedy such problems. All pre-1855 documents have already been digitalized; the only thing standing between them and a place on our website is our difficulty in finding a competent (and available) computer consultant to devise a program. The same is true for our pre-1976 grantor and grantee indexes. Rather than embark on the hugely expensive task of recreating those indexes on our existing computer system, we have simply scanned our index books, creating a digital image of each page. I envision presenting these electronically exactly as they were presented in paper form – in an alphabetized book that allows the user to peruse prior and following entries in the book, a method most people still prefer to the newer database search method. Internet access to recorded documents and indexes is just part of this equation. Other elements include electronic recording, document scanning at the recording terminal (so that originals are returned to the customer along with the receipt) and WIFI access for those who bring their notebook computers to the registry. But more on these other ideas later.