William: I understand your desire for a "universal title plant" BUT.. the problems I have with this would be the completeness and accuracy of the "total" data- I know there are some people(examiners/abstractors) that I would not trust for back title work- and the same would hold true here- -there would always be the question of "who did it" and were they in a rush to get home that day or some other reason for taking a short cut - 
Then the question of just physical size enters into the overall project- I work in the largest county in Virginia, they now are in the process of removing all the personal information that has been included on recorded documents from the beginning to date- the clerk has instructed those of us that are subscribers to the on line system that we will have to pay, through doubling the subscription fees, for this process, since the local government won't fund it. He informed us in a letter just received yesterday that they have 38 million documents to clean up. I don't know how many of those I have collected over the many years , but I am sure it is no where near that many.
Then the last remaining question would be access speed- If you have some of the docs and I had some of them- I would need to be assured that yours were available to me at all times- if you(or me) had a computer problem- that might force me to be "late" with some title or document that I had promised a client- and we all know how extremely tight on time everyone seems to be anymore-( as Robert's latest blog about vendor agreements-some think they can try to penalize us for not turning in the work in a certain time frame)( I would prefer to increase the fee for being turned in early!)
And those are just a few of my concerns about a universal collective title plant-Now to be fair, all of the counties I do work in are "on-line" systems and I have been working with these for at least the last 7 years now- ( some came on a little later) and I also retain all of the documents that I need or consider "good" for every case I complete or do- that means I have a lot of information here- but it only  good to me- because of the specific manner in which it is stored (owners name, county, client and date) This probably would not lend it self to inclusion to some other title plant storage method. And as far as title plant data , I do not mix title plant data with owner data- they have to remain separate for plant information  not to get lost in the shuffle of doing titles. It also makes for a smaller data size for a pure title plant- I can carry my entire plant on one "small" flash drive- and that has over 10,000 subdivision (complete) titles on it too.
Steve Meinecke