>>To all transcibers, >> >>My syndicate have moved from printed material onto handwritten scans. >>Allocations started about a fortnight ago and around 300 have so far been >>assigned. >> >>I have noticed that the transcibers response to the change of work divides >>into three, first, the smallest group who have responded to the the change >>and seem to be enjoying the additional challenge it presents, a second but >>also small group whose response and work rate has not changed and the third >>largest group whose work rate has slowed significantly or who have taken >>fright and stopped transcribing. >> >>So the kite I am flying is to ask whether we would serve the project and >>volunteers best by forming one or more specialist syndicates made up from >>those who prefer transcribing from hand written material? >> >>Come on transcribers what are your views? >> >>John > >I have just finished transcribing 49 hand-written pages (Dec 1845 >Births, from 1845B4-A-H-0002.tif to 1845B4-A-H-0050.tif) in 12 days. >The condition of the original index pages before being photographed >vary considerably. The ink has almost disappeared over large areas >of the initial pages of the A - H volume. A UV lamp would be >required to decipher the writing. Other pages are in such a good >condition that a page (40 entries) can be transcribed with no >uncertainties in a few minutes. The quality of most pages lies >somewhere between these limits. > >A contributory factor to the quality of the scan is the condition of >the microfilm. Virtually all films appear to be scratched to a >greater or lesser extent. The narrowest scratches cut up the >characters whilst the broadest ones can erase whole characters. > >I print out every transcribed page and check every line against the >original indexes in the FRC, London, so that my transcriptions have >hardly any uncertainties. Over 26 pages each with 40 entries the >number of corrections/additions per page varied from 1 to 50 with a >mean (average) of 12.1. I haven't yet checked the last 20 pages. > >I wouldn't be happy to upload pages with a large number of >uncertainties, which would be the case if I was unable to check and >correct my transcriptions in this way. I'm not surprised that >transcribers are put off by these scans of films of hand-written >pages in which both paper and film media are often in less than >ideal condition. > >One solution might be to set up a special London FRC Syndicate whose >sole task would be receive transcriptions from other syndicates for >checking against the original hand-written indexes in the FRC. Even >if enough members could be found for such a syndicate there would be >a considerable printing load on each member. To avoid this perhaps >the transcripts could be laser-printed centrally and hard copies >distributed by post. > >-- >Regards >Dick Jones >Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. U.K. <[email protected]> Apart from transcribing entries for my own research, all my FreeBMD stuff has been scans from the printed books. But as I'm in London, I'm quite liberal with _'s and *'s when transcribing from the scans. I know that I can very quickly generate a printout of all entries in all of my .sca files which contain a _ * or ? and whenever I'm at the FRC can look up them up in the books. It's easy to modify uploaded files, and the next database update will make the amended entries available. Having said that, some of the books are prints from film, and sometimes these have exactly the same blur/dirt/scratch so we're no further forward. So I don't double check all my entries at the FRC, I just double check those I've put _ * ? within. Mark Hattam