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Brian Clarke, Registrar-General |
The population of New Zealand is 3.9 million. In 1998 the New Zealand Registry chose KE Software to manage the vital events requirements of the entire nation after closing external data collection agencies. There are 75 concurrent users who register approximately 110,000 vital events per year. At present there are approximately 11 million records on-line.
The Registry’s business goals include:
- Back-capturing all historic records (1848 to 1997).
- Collecting all new birth, death and marriage registrations on an electronic system.
- Providing certificates from an electronic system.
- Providing on-line access to index information by approved Government Agencies.
Back-capture
The back-capture project took 3 years to complete and resulted in an index record and image of the registration of all birth, death and marriage records back to 1848. Integration of KE Software's index and image databases allows for an image to be displayed on screen alongside its corresponding index record. This allows the index record to be updated with more information in order to facilitate certificate requests, record updates and corrections.
New Registrations
All new birth, death and marriage registrations are electronically loaded into the system KE Software implemented. The keying of these registrations is performed by an external keying Bureau. As each record is loaded it is verified against strict validation conditions in order to ensure data integrity. In-house Quality Assurance is then performed on a subset of the loaded records.
All new birth registrations are verified against hospital records (also electronically stored).
All new death registrations are matched to their corresponding birth registration, if held in full data form on the system.
Certificate Production
Each year the Registry issues around 220,000 certificates. Approximately half of these are issued from new registrations (which are immediately available). The other half have their index record dynamically updated using the image of the registration so that the certificate may be produced. It is expected that over time the majority of index records will be fully digitized in this manner.
Government Agencies
Legislation has been passed to allow specified Government Agencies on-line access to index information held by the Registry.
A pilot web interface with the Passport Office was successfully trialled recently and progress is being made with the development of the system interfaces for the production environment.
Future Business
Future business revolves around:
- extending Government Agencies’ access to indexes
- making a version of the indexes available on-line for genealogists and other users.
Access to all index information will be integrated with an electronic order form so that customers can purchase certificates and imaged copies of the registrations on-line.
Platform
Primary Server: DEC Alpha, 1 CPU, 256 Mb RAM, 36 Gb disk, OSF1 V4.0.
Backup Server: Similar configuration (located in another city).