County courthouses routinely put public records in a searchable format on their Web sites. No one wants to root around musty cardboard boxes for such information. The county of about 200,000 lies just west of Pennsylvania's capital, Harrisburg. Visitors can search property assessments on the site by address or by parcel number, but not by owner's name. It is a deliberate attempt to protect citizens' privacy, Ward said.
Property owners receive their parcel numbers by postal mail from the county.
To look up property assessments by name, a researcher must visit the courthouse. The data itself is protected, too, said Jerry Wilkes, Cumberland's director of technology and information. Web visitors to the county's Web site can access a copy of the property assessment database, but not the live data, he said. The property assessment data resides in two places. One copy of the data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server Version 7.0 database at an undisclosed vendor site.