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Prime Minister Andrew Holness
The government is moving ahead with digitisation of the records of the Registrar General's Department as part of efforts to implement the National Identification System (NIDS).
At the signing of a contract on Friday to facilitate the digitisation, Prime Minister Andrew Holness noted that the RGD has decades of paper-based records as it only started electronically storing data about twenty years go.
"If you wanted to get your birth certificate and, let's say, you were in my age group and older and you went to the RGD for your birth certificate, don't mind that you see them typing in your name into a computer. That's just typing in the request. Somebody has to literally now go in the vault and go through the hundreds of thousands, millions of records that are there to find your birth certificate. That is a laborious process."
Apart from being laborious, Mr. Holness noted that this paper-based system has led to inefficiency and leaves records vulnerable to disasters, such as floods, fire or even being eaten by termites.
Two million records are to be digitised under the contract to be carried out by Fujitsu Caribbean.
"We can now go and first of all, scan them and create a digital image of them, and not only that... we will make the digital image intelligent, meaning that you can add codes to it that will support what is called the metadata," announced Mr. Holness.
The Prime Minister said due diligence has been done to ensure the RGD's data will be safe from being stolen or misused.
"The government has invested heavily in ensuring that there is the Data Protection Act, that we do have one of the strongest public key infrastructures available - the best that technology affords us right now and our money could buy - to ensure that your data is safe and will not be misused or mishandled," he declared.
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