Yesterday I went to Lancaster for another raid of the courthouse and was shocked to find things had changed since I was there the last time a couple weeks ago. All of the shelves where the deed books were kept are now empty! The index books and the files with the microfeche of the oldest deeds are still in the same place. But everything else has been transferred to files which must be viewed on their website.
I knew they were working on putting everything on-line, but I didn't expect them to pull the books off the shelves. What about the people who do not have high-speed Internet service in their homes? There is a computer in the deed room people can use, but there is only ONE computer. And those who are not computer literate wind up using a lot of time to try look up something they could find in minutes in the books. To make it worse, the indexes are not yet on-line. You cannot find a deed unless you know the exact number of the deed you want to see. The only way to find the number is to go to the courthouse and look at the indexes. I think they were a little hasty in pulling the books off the shelves before the indexes are on-line.
I guess they consider this progress and protection of valuable documents. In a way, it will be more convenient to look at deeds in the comfort of my own home, but I still think it is sad. A page on a computer screen cannot compete with the smell of old paper and the feeling of touching the past you get when you open a big old ledger to read a handwritten document.
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