General Register Office For England and Wales - Digitisation and Indexing (D&I) Project

Digitisation and Indexing (D&I) Project

A project, called DoVE (Digitisation of Vital Events), to digitise the GRO's records of birth, marriage and death was initiated in 2005. Implementation of the project was Outsourced to Siemens IT Solutions and Services in a three-year contract which expired at the end of July 2008. The process of scanning, digitising and indexing suffered severe delays, with only (roughly) half the records delivered by the end of the contract period. By mutual agreement between the IPS and Siemens, the contract was not extended. Digitisation of birth records up to 1934 and death records up to 1957 had been completed when the contract ended.

The records that have been digitised – over 130 million of them – form part of a system (called EAGLE, for "Electronic Access to GRO Legacy Events") which is used within the GRO to fulfil requests for certificates from the general public. A different system, known as MAGPIE ("MultiAccess to GRO Public Index of Events"), was intended to make the indexes available to the public via a website, but this will not now be implemented. Instead, following a lengthy review of options, a new project, called the Digitisation and Indexing (D&I) Project, was initiated.

The D&I Project was planned to: complete the digitisation of birth, marriage and death records; create an online index to those records; and improve the certificate ordering process. In September 2010 this project was suspended pending the outcome of the latest UK Government Comprehensive Spending Review. The IPS expected to reach a decision on the future of the digitisation project during financial year 2011/12, but in August 2012 it was announced that "there are no current plans to resume this work". However, the IPS says it "will continue to monitor the scope for future opportunities to digitise all birth, death and marriage records".