NATIONAL STATISTICS OFFICE 2001 ANNUAL REPORT

Department
Accomplishments
Avenue was open from 7:00 am to 5:00 pm. At the
releasing area at EDSA, NSO adopted a policy of
“servicing the clients until the last person is served”.
The NSO Archive
As the central repository of all civil registry
documents, the NSO to date has a total of
approximately 120 million documents and is
increasing, on the average, by 3 million documents
annually.
For 2001, a total of 6,695,798 documents
representing vital events were submitted through the
provincial statistics offices by the local civil registry
offices have been added to the archive. There were
1.859 million documents microfilmed and 10.338
million documents were scanned, indexed and
loaded into the computerized database.
The NSO’s commitment in the preservation
and safekeeping of documents paved the way for
reconstructing vital records for the benefit of
different civil registry offices nationwide. However,
for 2001, the NSO temporarily suspended accepting
requests for reconstruction of vital records.
Solutions
Despite its extremely limited resources, the
NSO took on the challenge of providing better public
service. The following were the management’s
responses to the situation:
Civil Registry System-Information
Technology Project (CRS-ITP)
This is the civil registry computerization
project, in cooperation with Unisys Philippines, Inc.,
launched in April 2000 under a Build-Operate-
Transfer (BOT) scheme, primarily aimed at providing
a more efficient storage and retrieval system and a
“while-you-wait” service in various service points (or
outlets) nationwide. The broad scope of work of
Unisys includes the supply of IT equipment,
development of application systems, scanning and
indexing of the documents, database maintenance,
site preparation, system integration as well as the
information campaign, while NSO provides the
frontline personnel during the actual operations.
Project cooperation period between NSO and
Unisys will last for 12 years. The first seven years are
devoted to development and the last five years will be
purely for operations. The development stage is
divided into four phases with specific deliverables in
each phase. Phase 1 covers the development of the
various application systems, the setting up of the
Central Facility and five Metro Manila outlets, and the
conversion of the first batch of documents (around 55
M). Phase 2, which is targeted for year 2002, will set
up more service outlets to be located in the regional
centers plus the continuing conversion of the second
batch of documents. The third phase, scheduled for
year 2003, will bring the service much closer to the
citizenry by setting up outlets in the NSO provincial
offices and continuing conversion of documents.
Finally, the fourth phase will be devoted to conversion
of the remaining documents and assessment of the
system for possible upgrade.
For 2001, the first phase was completed with
the following major accomplishments:
a. Application Systems Development. All the major
systems required for the outlets operations have
been developed, tested, and implemented.
b. Conversion of Documents. The scanning and
indexing of the birth documents for loading into
the database ran full-blast. The scanned
documents reached the 52 million mark but the
creation of index and its quality assurance
experienced lower production rates than
expected. The quality of the documents had been
the primary deterrent to the acceleration of the
indexing process. At the end of 2001 there were
about 14 million of the 120 million documents
loaded in production or in the computerized
2001 NSO Annual Report 19