For centuries, local governments across the United States have been keeping historical records of land ownership transactions. These records number billions of pages and go back to before the founding of the original British colonies. Government officials rely on these records to prove provenance of land ownership, and genealogists use them to research family trees.
But the vast majority of these records are maintained as handwritten paper documents. This document format is expensive to maintain, difficult to read and can’t be searched through easily. But as Avenu’s Alfredo Frauenfelder explains in his latest op-ed, there’s a new technology that can change that.
It’s called a Land Records Management System (LRMS). LRMS can combine digital imaging technology with the expertise of qualified transcribers to create a fully searchable, digital database of America’s historical records. With LRMS, all of America’s most precious historical documents can be more easily accessed by the public and more efficiently maintained by local governments.