For some time now I've been thinking how we can best handle the issue
of having to submit NIL entries for every day of the month when a
funeral director has no notices.
I know this is a bit of a pain for indexers - although an experienced
indexer can generate a full month of NILs in 5 minutes, many indexers
take longer than this. And for those indexing a number of different
FDs, it can be a very tedious task. I also know of one new indexer we
lost because he refused to submit all the NILs, considering it a
waste of time.
Well, you will be glad to hear that the problem has been solved.
I have written a program, which I will run at the beginning of each
month, to generate a NIL return for every day of the month, for every
funeral director. It takes me approx one minute to create these files
and load them into the dropbox folder. We have 35 FDs currently on
the list, so if each of those took an indexer (say) 10 mins to
generate all the nils for the month, that equates to about 6 hours
all up each month in indexers' time saved.
You will find these files in a dropbox folder (within Ryerson Files),
called "FD Nil Entries - April". All you have to do is take the 30
files for your FD at the start of the month and load them into the
folder where your completed indexing files go. As you then index any
FD notices during the month, any days with a notice will overwrite
the NIL entry when you click "Create a .txt file". By the end of
April you will have 30 files named nn210401.txt to nn210430.txt, some
with notices indexed, but the majority being NIL returns.
Now that the process has been simplified, we can move to the next
phase of FD indexing. I don't know whether anyone has noticed, but
the number of notices being indexed is down quite dramatically on
previous years. As an example, last week we only added 4,022 records
- that is a big drop on the 8,000 - 10,000 we were adding each week a
couple of years ago. Some of this is a decrease in back indexing, but
a very significant part of the reduction in numbers is the loss of
papers from the 2020 purge.
To help make up the shortfall, I have in mind a significant increase
in the number of FDs we cover. I would like to cover every town which
has lost its paper (as long as the local FD puts their notices online
- there is still a significant number who don't.) After we have that
bedded down, we can discuss whether or not we move into the major metro areas.
We already know that a significant number of FD deaths were not
recorded in the local paper pre-Covid, so I think we have plenty of
scope now to considerably improve our coverage.
If anyone has any queries, please put them to the list, so that all
indexers get to see the answer.
John
