Tuesday, February 17, 2004

The website seems to be working just fine. Tomorrow night we should have some details about what happened to cause our recent outage. In the meantime, a tip for users of the website. Often we have people tell us they can't find something on the Internet that is on the registry's computer. Usually, the sought-for-record is there all along. When searching the website, you should start with the broadest possible search. For example, enter the person's first and last name, omitting the middle initial and see how many records are returned. You can always limit the search to reduce the number of records returned. Here's where refining a search too much can be a big problem: Let's say you're searching the name "Susan Smith." You know she lives in Lowell, so you limit the search to records just from Lowell. Here's the problem. An attachment is against all of the person's property, so we put "None" in the town code field. When you only search for entries with "Lowell" in the town code field, you won't find the attachment. And no one wants to miss an attachment - so leave the town code field blank and get all possible records.

No comments: