Thursday, July 20, 2006

COCP Newsletter No 11

Thick mist in my part of Cornwall and I am about to depart for England. About 7 hours of motoring misery - and that is only if I am lucky. Back online on Monday morning.

This week saw a couple of pieces uploaded, several more are in post validation and I have three pieces here ready to be validated. As I am going to England to pick up a couple of grandchildren, census returns are likely to be stacked for now!

Currently, we are within a month or so of completing the 1861, with only five pieces left to do. The 1851 won't be far behind and the 1871 is approaching 50%. This week we recruited three more people. They all want to be transcribers, but we don't have work for them. We are now in the end game period of the whole Cornish project - not just the 61 & 51. More and more volunteers must be persuaded to switch to checking; there are already plenty of 1871 pieces waiting for checking.

The big task is the 1881. We have a transcript of the whole of the Cornish 1881; it just needs checking. So everyone who sticks with us will have to try their hand at checking. You might ask why we are doing the 1881. Well, wonderful though the LDS version is, we are finding mistakes as we compare our transcript with theirs. Anyway - there is question of symetry! How nice to have the whole of the Cornish 19th century returns online!

Checking is less painful than transcribing - and I have tried both! You have to tab through each field of each record, looking closely at the transcriber's work. If you find mistakes - and you will - you fix them. If you can't, you flag them up for me to look at during validation. Checking is a vital part of the project and has to be done properly. It is not difficult - just hard on the tab key!

So - be prepared - a grovelling email will arrive one day asking that you volunteer to try checking.

The Free Census database was rebuilt on July 12th and the Cornish volunteers remain by far the biggest contributors to the nearly 8 million records now online.

Onwards and Upwards!

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