Hi Karen and everyone else too,
It was great to finally get to the next lot of negatives requested by
enquirers and I'm pleased to say that we now have a good system which makes
it easier to replace the negatives in the right place once they have been
scanned! The sticky notes certainly helped today.
As I said the other night, the transcribing is rapidly coming to an end for
the negatives but I think, if you are all interested there will be many more
opportunities to get involved as the main project gets into motion which I
think is getting much nearer now we have appointed an embryo committee.
However in the sorter term I wonder if you would all like to take on the
searches for enquirers that I have been doing up until now? Some of you have
seen how it works and I am sure you will find looking at the actual
newspapers very interesting. Going forward we have to be careful as some of
the 'papers are in a very delicate condition however I envisage there will
still need to be some physical searching for a limited number of enquirers.
(In the main we are going to start researchers to the British Newspaper
Archive in London where they can go and undertake the search themselves -
this will ensure the preservation of the Herald's own copies so that the
digital images we produce will be of the best quality. Obviously once the
digitisation is complete we will no need to handle the physical copies at
all and searching will be much quicker.)
If you are interested in helping with the searches please let me know and
we'll set up a sort of rota so everyone gets a chance.
As Karen says the database which now totals over 93,000 entries does
inevitably contain a number of typos and errors which it would be good to
reduce by some form of proof reading (I don't think we'd ever be able to
eliminate them totally - just look at Ancestry!)
For your interest you can find the latest version at
https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZ38y4XZ6mbfsPShyPmcgFAIDqqRp7xx4Bfy
along with the reader software for Datapower which will run on all versions
of Windows up to and including Windows 10 (there currently seems to be a
problem with 11). But also there you will see a file called Version44.csv.
If you download this and double click it you will find it loads into Excel
and you can alter the columns to make all the text appear quite easily. It
should also be searchable with the normal "Find" tool.
If you would like to join in the challenge to proof read the database please
let me know too. However please don't start yet! It is too big a task for
one person and we don't want to end with multiple individual copies of the
file all with different corrections. Please wait for a little while and I
will speak to the project technical consultant (Hilary Roberts) to see if we
can find an online tool that will allow everybody to read and correct a
single online copy of the file (everybody at the same time too possibly!)
That will ensure that we end up with a single corrected file with each
correction highlighted and attributed to a specific proof-reader so that we
can ensure we have the best possible version for the final database.
The steering committee is starting to meet monthly now so the project will
start to move forward more rapidly and we hope soon to have a public meeting
to which all potential participants will be invited, including yourselves
and all those that expressed an interest to the Herald back in 2020 before
the pandemic struck.
Thank you for everything you all have done so far and I look forward
introducing you to the next stages as suggested above. Actually looking at
newspapers and negatives I hope makes the project become far more alive.
Chris
Chris Shepheard
Chris.shepheard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: heraldnegindex-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<heraldnegindex-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Karen Wolf
Sent: 22 March 2022 15:47
To: Farnham Herald <heraldnegindex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [heraldnegindex] Herald
Hi Chris
It was good to catch up with you this morning and visit the photo archives.
I offered to help proof read the Herald data we've all worked on for the
last year or so (inevitable typos would be my forte rather than misspelled
location names)and it occurs that perhaps there are others who would also
like to do so. By the way you mentioned that you would circulate a link to
the latest version.
Thanks Karen
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