Thursday, September 07, 2006

COCP General Instructions Pt 2

Project transcription software.

You are transcribing from discs lent to us by the LDS. The copyright is quite clear. Copyright in the images and contents of UK census returns is held by the Crown. The Crown has waived its copyright for the contents and licensed the copying of the images for commercial profit. Any transcription is the copyright of the transcriber, given that the Crown has waived its copyright. The transcriber can do with it what he or she likes, including giving it to Free Census. We have that in writing from the PRO.

Each transcriber will be supplied with five files. Three are browser files and tell you everything you need to know! There are also two spreadsheet files. Any spreadsheet will do. CENSDEMO shows you what your spreadsheet should look like when you have got going. The other is your working spreadsheet. This is a templated spreadsheet whose main effect is to prevent transcribers exceeding the set column widths.

If you are an Apple user or do not have a floppy drive, please contact me before you try start work.

When you open this spreadsheet, you will see that the first three rows are completed for you. The first has the piece number, the second has the column headings, the third lots of lower case letters. These are there to indicate to you the maximum width you are to work to in each column. These three rows must be left intact. The spreadsheet supplied is designed to stop you exceeding this column width.

It can be saved as a spreadsheet but as it gets larger you may need to do your backups as .csv files. Tell me if you do not know about csv formatting. You should do regular backups to floppies or some other medium. Please do not omit this precaution.

Bill O'Reilly will also conduct a ‘health’ check on your first six or so pages. Please do this because not only is it easier to catch mistakes early on, but it will let us know you have actually started. Just email your file to him. You can request these health checks at any time.

You will be allocated a piece to do although the disc supplied may have several pieces on it. This piece will have up to 3,000 records on some 150 pages. 1861 pieces are larger than those of the 1871. However, some of these pages will contain little or no data to be transcribed. How you do it is up to you. You can transcribe direct into the software or to paper.

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