Going Back 600 years

As one of the country’s largest land and property owners, The Church of England has vast archives of deeds and associated documents filling over 9 kilometres of shelving. The physical location of documents within the shelves together with headline information relating to the purchase, ownership or sale of over 900,000 properties was recorded in 100 large registers.

When The Church received an enquiry about a property a clerk would be required to sift through the registers to find an entry relating to it. This often meant contacting distant parishes since the date of the original purchase, or building of the premises, was often held at local level.

In order to reduce the labour required to manage this important function The Church required all the information from these registers to be captured onto their central database. Some of the registers were over 600 years old and monks had been seconded over the centuries to write up the entries in copperplate script.

Extremely high accuracy was required and ndata offered the most attractive solution in terms of project understanding, quality guarantees and cost. Experienced keyboard operators were trained for three months to understand the arcane script and terminology used in the registers. A contemporaneous ecclesiastical dictionary was compiled and after double keying and proof reading the data, this was used for spell checking.

The resultant file was more accurate than the source information with less than one error per million characters. This project involved more than 400 million key depressions.