Samoa is a South Pacific Island nation of 180,000 people. The Births, Deaths and Marriages section of the Samoan Justice Department (also known as the Registry) began computerizing its records in 1999. This process was assisted by a New Zealand Government aid project and managed by a New Zealand company, Group Action.
Axiell was chosen to customise and implement an existing system to suit the Registry’s requirements. Nearly 200,000 records have been captured onto the system, which is accessed by 5 concurrent users.
Prior to 1999 all records were held in paper volumes. Records dating back to 1962 have now been scanned and Axiell has has tailored the package to enable data back-capture from these images. Most of the back-capture to date has been of birth registrations, with death and marriage capture having recently commenced. All of the back-capture is being performed by local departmental staff.
Axiell has also expanded the system to accept birth and death information from the Health Department information system. This aids the Registry in verifying the authenticity of both birth and death registrations.
KE Software* has provided excellent support and service to the project of computerising the birth, death and marriage records of Samoa. Requests for modifications and additional services have been completed promptly. This has all been achieved in an often challenging working environment.
The Registry processes all registrations and issues certificates out of two offices, one on each of the large islands of Samoa (Upolu and Savaii).
At present only the Apia office on Upolu has been computerised. Until recently, the office on Savaii was legally unable to communicate electronically with Upolu. However, Internet access has now been established and the Savaii office will be computerised by the time the system is deployed.
Once the system is fully deployed, it is expected that around 10,000 registrations will be added annually to the system.
Platform
Primary Server: HP Netserver E60, PII 400MHz, 64Mb RAM, 36Gb disk for image storage, FreeBSD.
Backup Server: similar configuration.
*Now Axiell
