Lowell Deeds

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Again, the new address of our blog is www.lowelldeeds.blogspot.com

Yesterday I travelled to Worcester for a meeting with representatives from other registries of deeds, from the Secretary of State’s office and from ACS, the company that provides computer services to many of the registries. Our purpose was to review feedback that’s been received about the new masslandrecords site. Not surprisingly, the feedback has been mostly negative – that’s usually the case when you propose something new – and much of it was of the “new site is horrible” variety. But other comments were specific and we focused our attention on those. Rather than compile all comments and then try to make one big fix, fine tuning the new site will be an evolutionary process with gradual change implement in small doses over time. Two upgrades that will be implemented fairly soon will be to convert them format of document images viewable on the site from TIFF to PNG which should improve the speed of performance considerably without sacrificing image quality (and printed or downloaded images will continue to be of a very high quality that will yield a clear print). The other change will be to make a popup image viewer the default setting. A number of people found that having the image appear in the right half of the viewing window (the data retrieved in the query was in the left half of the screen) made it difficult to navigate around the image. The pop up viewer can be easily repositioned to allow the user to see as much of the document as the user’s screen will permit. Another change that should be implemented fairly soon is to add the ability to print multiple pages of a document rather than just the first page or the entire document. Other possible changes remain under consideration.

The new version of masslandrecords.com continues to be available for testing by customers. When you go to that web address, the old (a/k/a “classic”) version displays and is fully operational. There is also prominent language inviting customers to “click here” to try the new site. Unfortunately, many customers are interpretting that as a command and not an invitation and are clicking through to the new site and becoming discouraged by what they find.

My sense is that the criticism falls into three general categories: The first is that the new site is more difficult to use which is true, at least for the first few times you use it. Once you become familiar with it, however, the added functionality of the new site should be readily apparent. Every time we’ve deployed new technology at this registry, it has resulted in a negative reaction from users, but that negativity only lasts for as long as it takes for them to get acquainted with the new system. Ironically, when “classic” masslandrecords first came out, the reaction to it was quite negative. Now that folks have grown comfortable with it, the reaction is much more positive.

The second area of criticism is the speed (or lack thereof) of the new site. I have to agree with this. For someone pulling up a random document, it might not be too bad, but when you have to do a title search and retrieve dozens of documents, it’s aggravatingly slow.

The third area of criticism is the layout of the front page. The page is dominated by instructions and other non-functional items with the search boxes and links to advanced search funcitons tucked away in the upper 20% of the page. The functions available on this new site are an improvement over the “classic” version. I’m just concerned that no one is going to get to them to discover this on their own.

Sometime next week there is a meeting of all the registers of deeds who utilize the masslandrecords site. More information about whether it will be fully deployed or sent back for a re-configuration will be available then. I’ll keep everyone posted.

A website user emailed yesterday asking if the new version of masslandrecords.com had the capability of downloading document images, a useful feature of the “classic” version of that site. The answer is “yes” according to the site’s directions which say:

Document Downloading: In addition to printing, documents may also be added to your basket for downloading. The “Add to Basket” link is available at the top right hand side of the page once you have begun your search. To manage your basket contents, please Click on the Basket link available at the top left hand side of the page.

Here’s how I would explain it: Go ahead and conduct your search on click on the line of data that’s of interest to you. That causes an expanded amount of data to appear in the right-hand window (the data appears under the “details” tab). Clicking on the “image” tab displays the document image. To print the document, click on “print document.” To download the document, click “Add to Basket.” When you’re ready to download the document image, go to the very top menu bar and click “Basket.” That causes a list of all the documents in your basket to display in the left-hand window of your screen. Click “Download All” which opens a small window that has both “download image” and “download document info” checked – leave both checked or de-select one or the other, and click “next.” Another small window will appear giving you the choice of “open” or “save.” I recommend “save” which will allow you to save the downloaded image to your computer. Clicking “save” causes that download to occur.

When the image reaches your computer, it’s in a file that is “zipped” (compressed) so you have to “unzip” the file to get at the document which is actually saved in the very common PDF format. Zipping files used to be more common than it is today, so this task might be unfamiliar to you. If your computer uses Windows XP or Vista as an operating system, clicking on the zipped file should open it automatically.

This is the first chance I’ve had to write about the new version of masslandrecords.com which was made available to the public alongside the “classic” (or existing) version of MLR. Please take some time to test drive the new MLR and suppress your natural urge to dislike it because it is unfamiliar and new. If you do give it a fair, unbiased evaluation I am confident that you will quickly discern the major improvements in the new as compared to the old.

Back in the summer of 2002, this registry was the first in the Commonwealth to convert to the ACS computer system. By Labor Day of that year, our entire electronic holdings were available online on an ACS-hosted site. After additional registries’ switched to the ACS system, masslandrecords was born and was physically moved to the Secretary of State’s Office in Boston where it has resided ever since.

From the very beginning, website users have expressed an unreserved preference for the in-registry public search terminals over the web-based search function on masslandrecords. I and my colleagues from other ACS registries have always agreed with this assessment and have been diligently working to make the website function more like the in-registry public access terminals. The new masslandrecords is the result.

Here are some of the items requested by the registers of deeds that have been included in the new masslandrecords: (1) the ability to see all names returned pursuant to a query on the screen at the same time and not just groupings of like names with the number of documents in each group as is the case on the current MLR; (2) the ability to review the data about the document and the document image on the screen at the same time; (3) the ability to easily print the search results, not just the document images; (4) the division of the search functionality into separate pages for “basic” and “advanced.” Frequent users of the registry might not see the value of this last item, but those of us who routinely answer telephone calls from members of the public who are stuck on our website know that the single biggest obstacle to the layman’s use of our website is his propensity to over-populate the search screen and thereby prevent the retrieval of the very document he’s looking for. By initially presenting only a simple name search box, we hope to avoid this kind of consumer obstacle. Full search functionality (fuller than currently exists on MLR) is available on the “search criteria” link on the upper menu bar (in other words, “search criteria” is the “advanced search” we had requested). Finally, despite the presence of links to a “basket” and a “shopping cart”, all data and images on masslandrecords will remain available at no charge. The shopping cart function is built into the system so that registries that already charge for images may continue to do so and still use the same system as everyone else.

So that’s my initial take on the masslandrecords. I think it’s a huge improvement over what we’ve had thus far.

A new version of MassLandRecords, the statewide search site for registry records, is now in the hands of registry personnel for testing and evaluation. While we’re not able to open it up for public use just yet, I can describe some of the features. The test version we’re using has all of our existing data and images and is updated in real time with new recordings. The new website is designed to function more like the 20/20 Public Search system now in the registries than like the current MassLandRecords site. For instance, almost all data containd in a particular record is immediately visible on screen when that record is first returned in response to a search. Just a few clicks later, the image of a particular document will appear in the right hand portion of your screen with the indexing data on the left side, just as with the Public Search system. There are some changes that will take some getting used to: We’ve asked for a simplified search to be the first thing to appear with an “advanced search” just a click away. So when a customer first logs on, the first search screen only has fields for first and last names. To further refine the search (doc type, town, date range), you click through to advanced search. The reason for this change is that we found many casual users “overpopulating” search screens and thereby excluding documents of interest. If someone sees a field, it seems, they feel obliged to type something in it. As time permits, we will report on more of the features of this new system and on a possible timetable of its public release.

A regular website user emailed yesterday reporting an inability to view our web-based index and images on a Blackberry Curve cellphone, while an associate’s Palm Treo could access the index but could not display any images. Although I’ve owned a so-called smart phone for several years, I confess that I’d never tried viewing anything from the registry website on it. I’ve tried now but had no success. I did ask one of my associates who uses an iPhone if the Apple device did any better. The iPhone had no problem searching the registry index or displaying the document in the “quick one page viewer” (we stopped there). So now I’ve added “what can we do to make the registry website more accessible to cell phones” to my To Do List. In the meantime, if you think you might need that capability in the short term, your best bet is to go with the iPhone.

www.masslandrecords.com, the central website that hosts land records data from all the registries of deeds within state government, will be shut down this weekend beginning at 5 p.m. tonight. It is expected to be back online by 8 a.m. on Monday, March 23. As I understand it, the technicians will be performing maintenance to the central website. www.lowelldeeds.com will continue in operation through this period, so older documents will continue to be available from the “Record Books” link.

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.