It is one of the mysteries of modern life that if you ask the average person who public records belong to, they would most likely answer “the government.”
It’s almost like the old joke about “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” The answer isn’t as self-evident as you might imagine.
Government entities such as chancery courts possess public records. They are entrusted to keep and maintain them. But the records themselves belong to the public — that is — the citizens.
All too often, however, citizens find accessing these records is difficult, time-consuming and inconvenient, all of which discourage usage, unintentional as that may be.
It used to be that finding public records for everything from deeds to mortgages to certificates of trust, required a trip to the chancery court, to either search for those items or, depending on how long ago the document was made, through the bound editions in the court’s vaults.
For those who work during the court’s business hours, that meant the possibility of taking off work. And, of course, the court is closed on weekends.
Now, however, those records can be accessed quickly and easily, at any time of the day or night, on week days and weekends alike by any computer or mobile device. There’s no charge, either.
For the past two years, the Lowndes County Chancery Court has worked through a mountain of documents, scanning each document and linking them to the county’s website. Those records are now available for documents dating to 2002.
What used to sometimes require hours of manual search and a day or two before a hard copy could be provided, now takes a mere matter of seconds.
The importance of the county’s painstaking efforts should not be neglected. Through such diligence the public now had access to its information like never before.
That’s a tremendous service to citizens.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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