Nice People Thread Number 11 - A Treasury of Nice People

vivatifosi

PasturesNew wrote: »

That type of system would be good... so all 'staff' have to do is scan stuff in - and the transcription can be done a bit here and a bit there as many people spot errors.

There is too much "guardianship" of this stuff - rather than just bulk uploading it all and letting the people sort it out.

I've looked at volunteering for transcriptions (might look again once I'm settled/moved), but they seem to offer you sets ... and I think people would be more motivated to transcribe if they could do some picking...... eg. you transcribe the pages around the parts you are interested in....

I did want to multi quote this and address different paras specifically, but that's difficult on my tablet so have given up.

First para.. sounds a good method. With newer sources there are issues of copyright for stuff like newspapers, plus privacy and data protection for personal records.

Second para re guardianship... it's a difficult one this. Without such anally retentive guardianship, a lot of this stuff would have been chucked out. Particularly old paper records where "well we've got this new computer system, we don't need the paper files anymore", without the thought that paper was the original legacy system and the info needs to be kept still. Getting the balance right is hugely difficult. Much of it lies in public authority hands and there is very little funding for digitisation. Often it us reliant on lottery or charity funding, or dedicated volunteers.

Which brings me on to para three... unfortunately it can't easily be done like that as the project would be too piecemeal and you'd end up with chunks missing. There are some projects where you can do stuff like that though.. for example transcribing wills from the original Elizabethan secretary hand. I've done a bit of that myself and certainly wouldn't want to do it for random people as it takes too long. Local history societies are good places to start for that type of volunteering.

One of the big projects that has been underway for a while, certainly local to me, has been to record the names of the War Dead on the local memorials and to improve access to such info in the run up to the centenary of WW 1.

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

First para.. sounds a good method. With newer sources there are issues of copyright for stuff like newspapers, plus privacy and data protection for personal records.

A lot of that's over-egged. Copyright = newspaper who published it, so if they join in and give access that's covered; privacy = if it's newspapers, it was printed/so "out there" I guess you're thinking more of bmd stuff, but that doesn't apply for a lot as a lot of it is very old. Data protection = same as privacy.

So, for newspapers, I don't see any dates being a problem; for bmd etc etc there's still loads out there that are well old and being "sat on" or hoarded.

vivatifosi wrote: »

Which brings me on to para three... unfortunately it can't easily be done like that as the project would be too piecemeal and you'd end up with chunks missing.

There are chunks missing now .... but if one could pick the chunk you're interested in and transcribe it for your own benefit and those that come behind, then it at least offers the option of doing it, rather than sitting and waiting 20 years for somebody else to.

I've no interest in wills.... we've not been a Wills type of family

Local history societies ... aren't always "that local". So that becomes prohibitively expensive.

War Dead - I don't even know if any of my ancestors were in the war.... and no way of finding out (without spending money of course on lots of documents and waiting for stuff). All I have is names - and nobody died during the war years. I've seen the WW1 site where they're trying to get people to upload memories/etc.... and if you take a random name and type it in you quickly realise 50 other people had the same name as your ancestor.

tomterm8

PasturesNew wrote: »

A lot of that's over-egged. Copyright = newspaper who published it, so if they join in and give access that's covered;.

The problem is, many magazines newspapers and periodicals used licenses for photographs and etc which don't specify electronic reproduction rights... because the technology didn't exist at the time.

Plus, a lot of the newspapers simply don't exist anymore and the copyright to their articles are in the 'void' where no-one knows precisely who owns it... but someone probably does.

That's one of the reason for the pieces of orphaned works legislation slowly going through various legislatures that are quite controversial at the moment.

PasturesNew

tomterm8 wrote: »

The problem is, many magazines newspapers and periodicals used licenses for photographs and etc which don't specify electronic reproduction rights... because the technology didn't exist at the time.

Plus, a lot of the newspapers simply don't exist anymore and the copyright to their articles are in the 'void' where no-one knows precisely who owns it... but someone probably does.

That's one of the reason for the pieces of orphaned works legislation slowly going through various legislatures that are quite controversial at the moment.

Well, they could omit images

Ah, orphaned ... hadn't thought of those.... didn't realise they existed.

My "original" stomping ground's a particular bugbear. Local newspaper and they had a guy for decades writing little bits and pieces ... "down your way" "50 years ago" stuff.... nothing sensational, but he really seemed to be in cahoots with anything archivey ...... and there's nothing online and all material is only at the central library of that town ..... it's like a secret little club.

Over the years, he's completely on the inside, with massive access .... and is offering a research service, for a fee.... but I'd like to take random wanders round old articles from the 1930s-1970s, say. While I could do that, digitised, over the next 5-6 years .... I can't take the time to go and sit in that library solidly, for about 3 months asking for each individual one and being handed it .....

It'd, in fact, make more economic sense if these things were digitised once, then shipped away to a cheap/secure storage ..... freeing up the space they're paying for to store it in a pricier location.

michaels

Problem is though PN, once it is all online the EU will be insisting that it can not be found in case those mentioned or their desendents don't want it made public....

PasturesNew

I've just been out shopping ..... so hard when you've got one item to buy and dismiss it in the first shop due to use by date/price .... then go to the 2nd shop and they're out of stock. Instead of bread this week I was going to get muffins and/or crumpets.... had no joy. The Mr T 37p crumpets had tomorrow's date on them and the muffins were 80p.... so I went to Lidl and they had neither for sale

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Don't know if anyone has seen these two ads before, the Mercedes Chicken ad and Jaguar's response......

http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/jaguar-vs-mercedes-benz-advert-chicken-2013-12-18

Very funny, and Jag are impressing me more and more as a brand these days....

lostinrates

Vegetables, so many lovely vegetables.


I am nursing a vegetable food baby and a whole heap of pre and pro bionics to try and get be through typical lir ' I can do this now' attitude, today applied to a diet of foods I have missed and only those foods, and not in moderate quantity.

lostinrates

PasturesNew wrote: »

I've just been out shopping ..... so hard when you've got one item to buy and dismiss it in the first shop due to use by date/price .... then go to the 2nd shop and they're out of stock. Instead of bread this week I was going to get muffins and/or crumpets.... had no joy. The Mr T 37p crumpets had tomorrow's date on them and the muffins were 80p.... so I went to Lidl and they had neither for sale

Not long now till you can get a freezer and put all of this kind of annoyance behind you :j

I told DH I think lidos have bakers in store now, is that right PN?

Yorkie1

vivatifosi wrote: »

Definitely the smoked fish variety. The other sort is too horrible to contemplate, but would doubtless be a whole new form of talking book.

Eww, can you imagine having a politician as a permanent audio book :eek:

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

The Nice Baby is (1) awake and (2) suspicious, I think:

Lovely pics :j