The Client
Stradling two counties and with a population of more than 140,000, Mid Ulster District Council (MUDC) provides local services to a diverse population spread across both urban and rural communities.
The Problem
The council is responsible for managing and maintaining a large amount of land which it owns or tents across the Mid Ulster area. Information relating to the land owned or rented by the council, including historical deed records and location maps were contained in hard copy paper folders. This took up a large amount of storage space in council offices and resulted in staff wasting time having to manually search for relevant files.
MUDC wanted to create a digital back up of these folders to further ensure the lasting integrity of their records for the foreseeable future and to provide all staff members access to the digital files directly from their PC’s.
Additionally, MUDC required the capture of site boundaries from the files to be digitised and geo–referenced for use in a GIS.
What We Did
Mallon were handed over 200 historical deed files, containing pages of historical information dating from the late 1800’s to the present day. each file is a live, one–of–a–kind legal document listing all details of land ownership for MUDC sites throughout the history of each land parcel.
The completion of the project involved three distinct capture functions:
- The digitisation of all historical deed files. These were scanned into multiple images at 200dpi
- Geo–referencing of the associated maps into a GIS
- Digitising of site boundaries into a GIS
The Benefits
- All historical deed files are now easily accessible for MUDC’s staff
- Improved efficiency within MUDC
- Quicker and improved searching for staff
- Ability to search and view deeds via location
- Large volumes of paper files no–longer need to be stored on–site, freeing up valuable office space
- A digital backup has been created ensuring there will always remain a permanent collection of all deed records