Investigations of a Dog

Knowing how to program can save you from tedious repetitive tasks, such as inserting templates into a wiki page. Recently I’ve been spending more time editing the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives. I created a category for women’s wills, and while I was adding pages to it, I found that a lot of them didn’t have the correct template. Wills that were proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are held by the National Archives and can be downloaded from their DocumentsOnline service. Transcripts of these wills can be posted on Your Archives, and we have a template for them which automatically creates a link back to DocumentsOnline based on an ID code, and formats some key data (testator’s name, dates, catalogue reference) in a standard form. Most of the data which goes into the template can be found in the DocumentsOnline index. We used to copy and paste each value manually, which was not the best use of a human’s time. Faced with the prospect of doing this an awful lot, I decided to write a program to do it automatically. First I threw together a Python script, which was alright for me but no use for people who don’t have Python and BeautifulSoup (and I also wrote it in such a way that it relied on Linux with xclip installed). So then I decided to rewrite it in JavaScript, so that other people could use it in their browsers. You can find the finished version and documentation on the PCC Will Bookmarklet page. Below is a walk through of how I did it.

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There has been some bad news for historians recently: the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History has lost its direct government funding and is being privatised in a move disturbingly reminiscent of PFI (and to add insult to injury the IHR claims to be “delighted” about this!); the UK National Archives (or PRO to most of us who use it) can no longer afford to open on Mondays or offer free parking.

But it’s not all bad. There’s also some good news from the National Archives which has got much less attention than the bad news – in fact I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. They are now allowing and encouraging users to upload photos of public records held at Kew to Flickr and similar photo sharing sites. Crown Copyright had already been waived to allow republication of the text of public records but previously publishing images of documents didn’t appear to be allowed. Now it’s confirmed that uploading images to Flickr is allowed (provided that you’ve taken them yourself – this doesn’t cover documents bought from DocumentsOnline or Ancestry). This is a win situation for everyone, because these documents will be made freely available without it costing the archives anything – a major advantage when budgets and funding are being cut drastically.

The NA has its own Flickr account, and a group for visitors. Combined with the Your Archives wiki this could lead to some really exciting stuff. Some people are already using Flickr and Your Archives to publish Metropolitan Police leavers’ registers. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly going to upload all the photos I take in the course of my research. To start with I’ve put up the service record of my ancestor Tom Wenham from the First World War (photographed from the screen of a microfilm reader).

Still to come are some indemnity cases from SP24, and sooner or later I’ll have loads of SP28 to share. It would be fantastic if other archives would do this too, although some will probably be too conservative to try it. The British Library still doesn’t allow digital cameras, which just makes me not want to bother with BL manuscripts.

The UK National Archives (or PRO if you’re old-skool like me) has announced a new project called Digital Microfilm. This involves scanning existing microfilms of original documents and making the whole reel available as a single (very big!) PDF file. These files are free to download. The aim is to eventually digitize all the microfilm records held by TNA/PRO and get rid of the microfilm readers at Kew. I think this a great idea as it’s a quick and easy way of making these records more widely available without the time and cost involved in indexing individual documents. Users can post their own indexes and transcripts on the Your Archives wiki. Although the quality of the scans obviously won’t be any better than the microfilm that they came from (and I know from experience that full colour high-resolution digital photos are much easier to work with) PDFs will still be more convenient than using a microfilm reader – no more holding a camera up to the screen to get a copy of the microfilm! I’m not sure whether this project will include records that have already been (badly) indexed and made available through DocumentsOnline and Ancestry, such as WWI service records and medal cards, but I assume records which aren’t currently available anywhere online will be the highest priority.

Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.

Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.

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Do academic historians or PRO staff have a better knowledge of the public records? For records of the civil wars I suspect that academics have the upper hand. SP28 is not very well catalogued and sorted. Only researchers who have spent years working on it really know what’s there, and even now the source hasn’t been used to its full potential. Things are different with records of First World War soldiers. Amateur researchers seem to know far more about these than either academics or archive staff.

PRO/NA staff are increasingly aware that other people know more about their records than they do. One way they have responded is by launching Your Archives, a website running on wiki technology which allows anyone who has specialist knowledge of archival sources in the UK to contribute what they know. The site first opened to the public in spring 2007 and has continued to grow since then. I first started using it in October, and I’ve noticed an increase in activity in recent months. As well as the First World War stuff that I mentioned before, I’ve created a British Civil Wars category and started to populate it with my PhD notes, mostly taken from SP28.

There’s far more information that could be added, by me and by other people. Although contributions have been steadily increasing the number of regular contributors is still relatively small. I managed to encourage a few people from the Great War Forum to get involved, but not very many. Maybe one of the problems is that contributors need an unusual combination of specialist knowledge of archives, IT skills, and confidence with Web 2.0 ways of thinking. Or maybe Wikipedia has given all wikis a bad name that they don’t deserve.

If anyone who is reading this has relevant knowledge of PRO documents but hasn’t contributed to Your Archives, what would make you more likely to contribute?

Over the last week I’ve been exploring the possibilities of Your Archives, the wiki based site set up by the UK National Archives where users can contribute their own knowledge and transcripts of documents. The site has huge possibilities, and so far I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. To start with I’ve been mostly concentrating on First World War records, as the Great War Forum provides both an immediate audience and lots of potential contributors. Getting these people involved could make a very big difference to the project. I think it’s going to take to get a critical mass of GWF regulars using Your Archives regularly, but I’m trying to lead by example. It turns out that I’m not the first forum member to contribute to YA as another member had submitted some information about Labour Corps medal rolls a few months ago. However, that didn’t lead to lots of other people contributing. Can we change that?

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Earlier this year I posted about Your Archives, a wiki based site launched by the UK National Archives which allows users to contribute information and about, and transcripts of, documents held by the NA (and also information to supplement the National Register of Archives). Despite being excited about the possibilities of the site, I’ve been too busy to actually get involved. But today I finally registered and started contributing. I’m pleased to say that the terms of use now make it clear that restrictions on re-use of content don’t apply to transcripts of documents which are covered by waiver of Crown Copyright, and don’t apply to fair dealing under UK copyright law.

To start with I put up a transcript of a report on prisoner of war camps in the First World War, which you can see here. My first impression is that the site is very easy to use. Anyone who can use a web forum or a blog shouldn’t have any problems with it. The help pages are still very basic and there’s no style guide, but the easiest way to work out how to do things is to look at existing pages for examples.

I’ll be adding more contributions whenever I have time, and I’m also trying to encourage other people to contribute. I’ve posted on the Great War Forum asking people there to get involved. Between them forum members have a huge amount of relevant knowledge which needs to be more accessible. There have been some concerns raised on the forum that information is increasingly hard to find there because there’s so much of it. Your Archives could help to improve this situation, at least for the information which is within its remit, as a wiki based site would make the content much more accessible than a forum. It remains to be seen how many people will actually get involved. And if you’re reading this post and have any knowledge about TNA/PRO documents or other UK archives, go and sign up! Now!

I’ve had a reply to my last e-mail to the UK National Archives about the Your Archives terms of use. Your Archives is a wiki based website where users can share their knowledge of NA holdings and other British Archives. I’m very excited about the site, but I had some reservations about the terms of use (see here and here for more details of my objections and the NA’s first reply). The schwerpunkt is: I’ve received a satisfactory reply from the NA and no longer have any reservations, so I’ll be registering and starting to contribute as soon as I have time. But if you have too much time on your hands, here’s the more detailed version:

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Last week I posted about Your Archives, a wiki-based website set up by the UK National Archives to allow members of the public to share their knowledge of archival holdings in the UK. While I’m very excited about the possibilities of this site, I also expressed some major reservations about the terms of use, which place serious restrictions on the re-use of content published on the site. But I didn’t just solipsistically moan about it on my blog. I also contacted the NA and called on them to use a GNU Free Documentation License, as used by Wikipedia. I’m pleased to say that they responded quickly with a more detailed explanation of their position. This is what they said:

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Last week the UK National Archives launched Your Archives, a wiki which allows users to contribute their knowledge of documents held by the NA/PRO and other archives in the UK. I first found out about it on a visit to the PRO in January, but I didn’t have time to look at it then, so I was quite excited about it finally going on the web. My PhD research gave me some very specialised knowledge of English Civil War records which would be valuable to other researchers but which wouldn’t fit into any kind of “scholarly” publication, so a wiki would be the ideal way of sharing that knowledge. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at Your Archives I’m half impressed and half disappointed. Although it has huge potential it needs some changes before it lives up to my expectations.

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