Hello to all,

In case you missed the notice regarding the new vendor for the Hancock County Registry of Deeds, Fidlar, and the webinars that took place last week, you may be interested in learning of the in-person training sessions that are scheduled for Monday November 13, 2017 after 2PM, all day Tuesday November 14, 2017, and the morning of Wednesday November 15, 2017 when Andy Horsfall, Territory Manager for Fidlar, will conduct workshops and answer questions regarding the stand alone desktop application Loredo used by professional records researchers. Loredo looks quite promising and comes in both a desktop version of the program, and a mobile version, though I'm uncertain how deeply Andy will be getting into Loredo's mobile app during his training sessions at the Registry of Deeds offices at 50 State Street in Ellsworth.

Last Friday I was able to schedule time to be in attendance for one of the webinars and heard participants comment on some of their objections to the interface. Below is the email that I sent to Andy Horsfall yesterday morning in response to his email below (read from the bottom up) wherein I've tried to articulate and illustrate what I understood to be some consensus of the opinions concerning the Loredo desktop application that were expressed by all of the participants.

Consider blocking out some time to attend one of these workshops on the these dates if you do deed research in Hancock County, and please let Fidlar known any "suggestions for future development to improve the user experience".

Kind regards,

Kelly


Andy,


Subdivisions are not Towns


I understand Fidlar has developed Loredo for use in the western states and are primarily concerned with terms associated with the Public Lands Survey System (PLSS) and the vast majority of the United States that operate under it. However, the Colonial States operate under a loosely organized system of metes and bounds, and not a rectangular system from where the term "subdivision" in Loredo's lexicon emerges.

Furthermore, the terms: village, town, township, plantation, and unorganized town, have unique meanings predicated on the same early evolutionary development of land records systems in the colonial states. All of these terms have retained their respective particular meanings into the present-day land records for these colonial states, Maine included. These terms, some of which exist in PLSS states, have different regional meanings; for example, an Iowa township implies 640 acres, then come sectional subdivisions, 1/2 section, 1/4 section, etc. The physical location of a place, and even a parcel's size, can be discerned in the PLSS state much more accurately and quickly than than in the colonial states. Here in Hancock County there is one city, dozens of towns (both organized towns, often known as municipalities, and unorganized towns) and many villages. The term "town" is one of the fields in the search results that the researcher closely scrutinizes.

Maine Law defines the term "subdivision" and has it codified in many sections of the Maine's statutes. The term subdivision is not an arbitrary term in Maine law. Subdivision is also a specific document type that has been indexed and used for many, many years throughout the state of Maine in its land resords, not just in Hancock County.

All of this is why you heard such an uproar yesterday morning during the webinar over the Loredo application's misuse of the term subdivision, its failure to clearly indicate town, and the confusion over Loredo's use of the term location as representing a book instead of a geophysical place. Just as subdivisions are not towns, book and page references do not represent location.

Researchers Don't Use Doc Numbers
The other aspect of the webinar that met with raised eyebrows and repeated comments was the widespread use of document numbers, both in terms of Loredo's search criteria and its search results. While the document number may be vital to the internal workings of Loredo's software, this is never a field that the researcher uses. Even though in current times, when the actual physical printing of deed books haven't taken place for a dozen years or so (at least here in Hancock County), the book and page for a specific recorded document remains the defacto standard for document identification throughout many and varied industries including title abstracting, court systems, surveying, engineering, etc.


Search Results
After some study of the v8 Release Notes and the Loredo Manual and after the webinar yesterday, it wasn't clear if what we discussed during the webinar in terms of customizing the tabular layout of the search results screen could be saved as a default setting, for example using a template or saved preferences, that would automatically be used each time the researcher launched Loredo.

Below, I've tried to illustrate what I understood as the consensus of the webinar participants in so far as what they would expect to see in the search results. Note in particular that the Loredo fields "Party" and "Party Two" were renamed for both regional custom, clarity, and to be more generally concise. The use of "party of the first" and "party of the second part" may be common in locations of the country, but is not frequently seen in Hancock County. Grantee and Grantor are the standard terms and fields that are used for searches.





Printing and File Naming
During the webinar yesterday, we weren't able to actually see you use the print functions of Loredo; e.g., format options, how to Set/ or use the Printer Reset Tool, and how to email, and how to save a document to our local computer. However, and as previously discussed during the webinar, there is a problem introduced through the use of the Doc Number instead of the Book and Page. Below, I've tried to illustrate one possible location in the Print Options Dialog where 1) the Book and Page information could be clearly presented to the user and 2) a check box for the much needed feature to have the Book and Page printed in the margin and on the face of each page of the document. The need for marginal identification arises due to the fact that many thousands of (possibly a million) pages only have printed on their face their page number alone with no indication to which book they belong. Several vendors ago, they offered the excellent feature of printing the Book and Page in the margin.




Also, I may not have communicated the question clearly enough about file naming schema. When printing a document to a system printer, such as Microsoft to PDF:



The user will be prompted where to save the PDF and by what name to save it. This is another are of great concern and one in which the current vendor (Kofile) has really dropped the ball. Before Kofile acquired Property Info, Property Info had a very logical schema in the naming of the file being save. Kofile abandoned the logical schema in favor of obfuscation through the use of some arcane combination of document number co-mingled and hyphenated with a meaningless numeric string:


 

From the outset of the save file dialog, the default name for the file being save should be predicated upon Doc Type, Book and Page, and the number of pages in the multi-page PDF:







The other email that you mentioned accidentally moving/ deleting was originally sent to you at 20171110 15:13 ET with the subject line: User Name and Password and appears pasted below.



Hello Andy,

It appears that user names default to all upper case. I trust this is not the rule for the passwords - please affirm what rules apply to password creation for Loredo. I'd prefer to have a randomly generated password assigned for my various employees which is secure, such as: gMrL;#2='MZHTMA;

Also, I'm curious; what happens when they forget the password? There doesn't appear to be any means in the Loredo interface for the researcher to retrieve their lost password. Neither the v8 Release Notes, nor the Loredo Manual speak to this.

Thank you very much.

Kind regards,

Kelly

--

Mr. V. Kelly Bellis, ME PLS 2099 :: WQTS485
 17 Union Street :: Ellsworth, ME 04605
http://aerial.panocea.us :: 1+ (207) 667-6912


While I understand that the there are no plans to revise the Loredo application, it is my fervent hope that Fidlar is interested enough in working with Hancock County and in making Loredo better fit our needs. I look forward to working with Loredo's improved interface and in some small way to help Fidlar make those improvements, in as much as I'm able to articulate and illustrate our researchers needs.

Thank you very much.

Kind regards,

Kelly

--

Mr. V. Kelly Bellis, ME PLS 2099 :: WQTS485
 17 Union Street :: Ellsworth, ME 04605
http://aerial.panocea.us :: 1+ (207) 667-6912


On 11/11/2017 5:56 AM, Andy Horsfall wrote:
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Thank you, Kelly.

I am happy to take suggestions for future development to improve the user experience.  However, Fidlar does not have any plans to change the Laredo program at this time.  The subdivision field used for towns will also remain with the word subdivision.

You also sent me an email after this one that I moved, and cannot seem to find.  Would you mind resending?  I apologize as I do not know what the content was.

Thank you,







ANDY HORSFALL
Territory Manager
563-345-1293 | Office
603-321-9456 | Cell
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