Monday, April 21, 2008

Searching for Survey Records

Seems that in Bernalillo County, NM, there is a bit of a gap between recording surveys (non-subdivision plats) and how they are indexed and located. We have for years had microfiche of all the plat books, but we've never received the survey book. The survey book is for plats of surveys, boundary surveys, ALTA surveys, etc. They are rarely reported on in Title commitments and I believe the reason why is that they really aren't indexed very well (or indexed at all for that matter). Makes one wonder which surveys are really found during the course of research and which are not. It is poor database management to index something such as S10, T4N, R5E, N.M.PM - if I run a search on S10, T4N, R5E, NMPM, it would probably not come up - depending on the search engine. The county (and area professionals) need to come up with a better solution here and implement it pronto! We're missing out on a lot of good data (I'm assuming) and every day that passes, is another day that legacy data is missed. At least the Clerk's Records Search is online - but I wish we could get to the level of Maricopa County's map locator. Maybe someday....

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