Some of you more eagle-eyed indexers may have noticed a new source
appear a couple of weeks ago on the Coverage Page - the NSWPI.
When we found this source (and it's a beauty!) a few weeks ago, we
tossed up the idea at committee level - do we add the entries to
Ryerson, or do we just add a link to the index and let users search
it themselves? The unanimous decision was to add the records to Ryerson.
Our logic was that, no matter how hard we tried, we could never
expect to index every notice published in a NSW paper, or listed on a
NSW FD's website. But the NSWPI records the name, date of death, and
last residence of roughly two-thirds of the deaths occurring in NSW
each year - around 35,000 - 40,000 names. That is a major increase in
our coverage for NSW.
Additionally, a check of the index to notices published in the SMH
shows a heavy bias towards Anglo-Saxon names. This is not
representative of the ethnic mix of the NSW population, whereas the
NSWPI is a much better representation.
The NSWPI is the gold standard among state probate websites. It is
the only one which allows searching by date of submission, and the
only one to provide a simple download procedure. This makes obtaining
a daily file of data from the NSWPI an exceptionally easy process -
think 10 minutes for a month of daily files.
The data as supplied from the NSWPI does require a small amount of
tweaking before we can load it into Ryerson. Again, 10 minutes is the
benchmark - it is simple to tweak a daily file of around 150 entries
into the required format in less than 10 mins.
Paul Kean has written a very neat little program which takes the
tweaked file of NSWPI data and converts it into a .txt file which can
be loaded straight into Ryerson.
The whole process has been documented on the "Resources for Indexers"
page under the heading of "Special Projects". There are two files
there - a document setting out the Why and How, and a video (pretty
bad, but the best I could do as Spielberg was unavailable!) showing
the process in action.
This is where YOU come in.
I have a dream that during 2022, we could add the entire NSWPI to Ryerson.
The period covered by the NSWPI is from 21 Jan 2013 to date. I have
already added this source to my daily list of downloads, and have
2022 covered, so there remains about 7 weeks short of 9 years to be
done. That's about 450 weeks, with a week taking roughly one hour to
download and tweak. Between us, we should be able to rustle up 450
hours in the next 8 months, surely.
If you are interested in helping out with what will probably be the
most satisfying Ryerson project of 2022, please have a look at the
document and video on the Resources page, and then head for the
Current Indexers spreadsheet to book your slot <g>
John.
