Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that they had digitized images that were printed out for COLBs: I meant that the DATA used to print the COLBs were in some centralized database so that clerks didn’t have to rely on manually (or even electronically) pulling a hard-copy or fiche of the original birth record in order to respond to requests for COLBs.
I assume someone just types in a name, DOB or certificate number to search a database, selects the correct record and then hits PRINT etc. But this more efficient arrangement presupposes that at least some selected pieces of data originally appearing on birth certificates were transferred/transcribed into such a database.
If I remember correctly, a blog by Dr. Mitchell Langbert stated how the process was handled when he interviewed some people from Dept. Of Health in his blog.
I didn’t have the impression that the archives were databased accessed yet.