Initial development and implementation of mdlandrec.net has been completed. As of April 30, 2009, there were 174,055,852 images of Maryland land records and indexes, as well as 177,393,209 index database records available online - that is all land records and extant indexes created since the beginning of European settlement in Maryland in 1634. This project, a joint effort of the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Clerks, and the Maryland State Archives has been a great success, making Maryland's land records readily accessible on a scale previously unimaginable.

The Archives also has been asked to re-focus attention and resources on improving plats.net.  As you no doubt recall, plats.net was left unfinished when our collective attention turned to putting Maryland's land records online in 2003. Our long-term goal is to incorporate plats.net into mdlandrec.net. But these two popular and successful digital access systems are very different in design and function. A great deal of re-programming and re-design will be needed to accomplish this goal. In the meantime, however, there are several concrete improvements that we can make to plats.net that will address ongoing user concerns.

mdlandrec.net Version 3 Roll Out

Our original target roll out date of July 1, 2009, will not be met. This is due primarily to several unforeseen issues that arose during initial load testing. Initial load testing (which is designed to overload the system to determine optimum hardware and software configurations) indicated that additional work was required. This is what load testing is intended to do, but the nature and scope of the corrective actions needed were, in some instances, unexpected. These issues, all of which had to be addressed before cluster or functional testing could begin, include:

• Software updates to ColdFusion8 and ActivePDF resulted in these two critical pieces of software no longer being able to communicate with each other. It has taken several months of close work with the manufacturers to resolve these issues and develop the necessary software patches.
• Necessary agency wide software upgrade from Microsoft SQL2005 to SQL2008 has to be completed and tested before roll out can begin.
• Volume control refers to the Archives image tracking and control system that enables mdlandrec.net to link mainframe index records with their appropriate land record images. In the course of designing and testing version 3, we discovered that volume control needed substantial cleanup in order to function as intended. Specifically, nearly 400,000 mainframe database records that look like valid land record citations, but which either
• Refer to materials not actually incorporated into mdlandrec.net, like plats or financing records, or;
• Do not enable the user to distinguish between multiple volumes that have the same name. This is a common occurrence because historically each new clerk started over with book 1.
These index anomalies result in many search returns that are confusing and/or misleading to system users. Because they cite what look like valid book numbers, they do take users to the requested book/page reference. The problem is, the instruments returned are not the actual instrument requested. Archival staff have to investigate each of these citations to determine into which of the two categories it falls and to take appropriate corrective action. This is slow, careful, labor intensive, and necessary work that must be completed before Version 3 can function as designed.
• Approximately 2,000 out of the 22,307,882 defined instruments currently available in mdlandrec.net are extremely large, running to many hundreds of pages. This exceeds the maximum instrument size that reliably can be delivered within a 30 second window.  Fortunately, these are not "real" instruments, but rather a by product of incomplete COTT indexing. Archives staff are working to determine true end pages for each of these instruments so that they return and display properly.

• Load testing of application server cluster configuration
• Update test script and system documentation as revisions are made to application code
• Revise and update system reports and statistical analyses
• Once cluster load testing is successfully completed functional testing can begin
• internal testing
• external testing
• Functional testing will reveal issues that need to be addressed and corrected
• Once these issues are corrected, we will need another round of functional testing
• internal testing
• external testing

Steve Hales and the staff of the Circuit Court for Worcester County are to be commended for taking the time to identify and extensively document a wide array of outstanding issues users have with plats.net. This encyclopedic catalog of plats.net issues is something that the Archives should have compiled, and it will serve as the starting point for a fundamental re-assessment of how plats.net ought to work. Mr. Hales and his staff identified several areas of concern and/or dissatisfaction with plats.net as it operates currently.

• System must be able to produce scale copies of plats.
• Gray scale images, mostly in JPEG format, often appear dark and difficult to read. They also are often difficult to print.
• Many images, mostly derived from microfilm, often are too light to be read or printed.
• Many search results are not linked to any plat images and serve only to confuse system users.

• Archives has to capture the most complete and accurate image of each plat as the archival image.
• Whatever the format of the archival images, viewer independent PDFs would be the publicly viewable image available in plats.net.
• To the extent that this is possible, there will be only a single best digital representation of each plat in plats.net.
• Any additional references to a plat that are not associated with an actual image will be tagged to not be displayed to the public. Additionally,
• Archives will provide clerks with an electronic report of all plat database entries that have been "turned off" in this manner.
• Archives needs to determine if a secure "internal" version of plats.net can be made available to designated court staff to enable them to view all the database records incorporated into plats.net, including all those that have been "turned off".