Our story
138 years of preserving the public record
Cott Systems was founded in 1888. Since then, the tools have changed — paper ledgers, microfilm, imaging, the cloud — but the job has not: making the public record findable for the people who need it.
Where we started
Cott has delivered products and services to local government since 1888. We quickly became a leader in designing "modern" manual index systems, and as early as the 1930s our staff was reindexing old, inefficient systems into Cott-developed indexes. The work was slow without computers, but the searching public praised the result — many of those paper-based indexes are still in local offices today. The reindexing expertise we built then is still in demand now, and it is the same combination we bring to every conversion: experienced data and imaging staff working alongside our technology team to preserve and modernize a jurisdiction's records.
Technology changes the world
We expanded into data processing services for local governments in 1964, and we still produce alphabetized indexes for land and other vital records today. As computer technology became affordable for large government entities in the 1970s, we built systems that produced those indexes on-site rather than off.
In the 1980s, falling computer costs let many local governments centralize their operations. That centralization gave offices a new way to serve the public and generate fee income, by offering computer access to public records directly to the private sector.
The 1990s made document imaging central to records management. Drawing on our experience designing and supporting indexing systems, we developed a complete land records management system — our first installation went live in 1993 — and it has been rebuilt several times since to keep pace with new technology.
Cott solutions today
That accumulated experience drives what we build now: Resolution3, our land records management system; RECORDhub, our public search and online-payments layer; Online Index Books, which puts historical index books online; PropertyCheck, real-time fraud alerts for property owners; and Verdict, our court case-management system. Complementing the software are records services: backfile imaging, redaction, reindexing, bindery, and microfilm.
138 years in, the throughline has not changed: we build for the officeholder responsible for the record, not for an abstract market.