LCR scans 2,514 documents

The Local Civil Registry Office was able to scan some two thousand five hundred fourteen documents in line with the ongoing digitalization of the available civil registry documents, especially births, deaths and marriages.

Local Civil Registrar Luz Perez stated that all the aforesaid documents from 1945 to March 2022 were scanned and are already up to date.

She disclosed that verification of requested copies takes about 1-2 minutes and issuance of certified copies takes only 2-3 minutes.

For the protection and preservation of records, the local civil registry pointed out that compactor cabinets are already in place which keeps the LCR’s records and files safe from theft and misplacement.

“We are currently in the process of digital archiving and we hope that we will be able to complete the same as programmed,” Perez stressed.

According to her, seminars on the filing up of certificates of live birth and death for barangay secretaries were already conducted, thus, they were already equipped on the procedures in the preparation of the aforesaid documents being the LCR’s partners in civil registration.

Perez emphasized that the civil registration and vital statistics system are systems that produce births, deaths, and causes of death information, which are one of the fundamental strategic importance for the country’s development process and governance.

She explained that the same is also considered the gold standard of health information in the country, especially during the prevailing Corona Virus Disease (COVID) 2019 pandemic, where vital statistics played a crucial role in accurate and timely decision-making of officials.

Moreover, Perez emphasized that civil registration contributes in many ways to the normal functioning of society because if a country deems it important to improve family organizations in order to guarantee social order; to guarantee human rights; to promote public health and to make available better information on which to base development planning, it should consider improvement of civil registration an important and pressing matter. – Dexter A. See