The Client
The Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) is a strategic housing authority, offering a range of services to people living in socially rented, privately rented and owner occupied accommodation.
The Problem
NIHE is a landlord to approximately 89,000 dwellings and as such, holds a large paper archive of historical deed records. These were taking up a large amount of storage space with staff time being wasted having to manually search for relevant files.
NIHE wanted to create a digital backup of their historical deed records to further ensure the lasting integrity of their records for the foreseeable future.
Additionally to this, the Housing Executive required the capture of information from the records to be digitised and geo–referenced for use in their Land Terrier Management System.
What We Did
Mallon were handed over 4,000 historical deed files dating from the late 1800’s to present day. Each file is a live, one–of–a–kind legal document detailing the transactions of land ownership for NIHE sites throughout the history of each land parcel.
The project as a whole involved four distinct capture functions:
- The digitisation of all historical deed files. These were scanned into multiple images at 300dpi
- The manual capture of attribute data from the file. Each deed was analysed individually for relevant information which was recorded into a bespoke database used to capture the locations and attributes of the site
- Geo–referencing of the associated maps into a GIS
- Digitising of site boundaries into a GIS
The Benefits
- All historical deeds are now easily accessible via NIHE’s Land Terrier Management System
- Improved efficiency within the NIHE
- All gaps in historical data were filled leaving a completed dataset
- Creation of an up–to–date Land Terrier allowing for its role out across the NIHE network
- Quicker and improved searching due to the capture of all attribute data
- Ability to search and view deeds via location
- A digital backup has been created ensuring there will always remain a permanent collection of all deed records