John, That is a great idea.
I notice that a lot of people are not putting notices in newspapers
they are just telling friends by Facebook
I know of 2 recent ones.
Jean
On Sun, 1 May 2022 at 22:11, John Graham <johngrah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
