Land Victoria
Land Victoria is responsible for managing the register of all property in the state. It needs to ensure that the records it holds are accessible while protecting them from loss or damage.
Land Victoria
The Solution
Challenge

With approximately 3000 land dealings lodged each day for registration and more than 15,000 requests for title searches each day, Land Victoria, part of the Department of Sustainability and Environment, needed to make its documents more quickly and easily accessible.

The scope of the project involved the scanning and capture of more than 3.5 million paper land titles and three million legal instruments, plus 42,000 plans of subdivision and 270,000 survey reports, to create a digital register of images and data.

Apart from the challenges presented by the sheer volume of records and the aged condition of many titles, the entire document conversion process had to take place without affecting Land Victoria's Land Registry day-to-day operations. It was mandatory that all these documents remained accessible to the public throughout the entire conversion process.
Solution

We took on the massive project of converting Land Registry's paper-based land titles and associated documents to electronic format, together with the maintenance and supply of imaged documents.

Whereas other state registries allocated 5-10 years for similar projects, we committed to an 18 month turnaround. This minimised disruption to Land Registry's ongoing business activity and allowed them to deliver the new solution to its customers as soon as possible.

Conversion consisted of a number of stages and a huge variety of processes and techniques, including specialised colour scanning and the creation of digital files; text capture; quality assurance; information and image correction; and content repository system development. Many of the documents on paper, parchment and pigskin were over a hundred years old and required special handling.

In addition to creating electronic images, text from the scanned titles also had to be accurately captured into a structured database and all title diagrams reconciled to their respective plans.

This type of process hadn't really been undertaken before in Australia on this scale, but a solution was developed whereby a team of our staff was located on site at Land Registry to undertake title scanning on a 24 hour continuous basis. The scanned images were beamed back to our facility at Derrimut via a 34 megabit per second microwave link, for processing and storage. 

We have also developed an interface between the two locations, so that each document could be automatically located and tracked at any time during the conversion process.
Benefit

The key benefits for Land Registry have included:

  • Dramatically improved search turnaround times, from 24 hours to a few seconds.
  • Process improvements and estimated user cost savings of 20%, plus increased Land Registry employee productivity.
  • Quicker and easier registration of land dealings and the provision of remote search and retrieval access through the web site has improved customer service significantly.
  • The availability of extremely high-quality electronic images means that access to paper titles is rarely required.
  • The establishment of a secure electronic register with offsite disaster recovery has greatly mitigated the risk of lost or damaged titles.

"We are now able to access images of title documents within seconds. Access to a completely electronic environment has truly revolutionised the way we operate.

"HPA (now Salmat) provides a genuine partnership. This has been a large, technically complex project and HPA (now Salmat) demonstrated an extremely dedicated approach, working tirelessly to address any issues that arose and developing workable solutions."

John Payne, Manager Production Support, Land Registry


Business Solutions
Business Solutions used in this project
Information Management
Information Management
Customised information management systems for improved efficiency and security.
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