parish register films - Society of Genealogists (London)

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Nathaniel Taylor

parish register films - Society of Genealogists (London)

Legg inn av Nathaniel Taylor » 04 mai 2007 02:34:51

Am I hallucinating, or did not the SoG formerly have a set of webpages
which listed the holdings of parish registers on microfilm, with years
covered, one page per county? I remember consulting such pages last
year. But what is now available is only a general list of parishes for
which the library purportedly has something, with an unhelpful link to
the online catalogue, with no information on PR films either on the
county page or in the online catalogue. Here is a sample of a current
page (Nottinghamshire); all the county pages are revised as of last fall
(November or thereabouts):

http://www.sog.org.uk/prc/nottinghamshire.shtml

<...time passes...>

Ah. The web Internet Archive Wayback Machine confirms I was not
hallucinating:

http://web.archive.org/web/200602140034 ... /prc/notti
nghamshire.html

I guess it was thought too much of a bother to keep such pages current?
Pity this information is NOT on the online catalogue. Fortunately, the
Wayback Machine can be used to retrieve each county's similar page as of
sometime in 2005.

Nat Taylor
http://www.nltaylor.net

Tim Powys-Lybbe

Re: parish register films - Society of Genealogists (London)

Legg inn av Tim Powys-Lybbe » 04 mai 2007 12:02:46

In message of 4 May, Nathaniel Taylor <nathanieltaylor@earthlink.net> wrote:

Am I hallucinating, or did not the SoG formerly have a set of webpages
which listed the holdings of parish registers on microfilm, with years
covered, one page per county? I remember consulting such pages last
year. But what is now available is only a general list of parishes for
which the library purportedly has something, with an unhelpful link to
the online catalogue, with no information on PR films either on the
county page or in the online catalogue. Here is a sample of a current
page (Nottinghamshire); all the county pages are revised as of last fall
(November or thereabouts):

http://www.sog.org.uk/prc/nottinghamshire.shtml

...time passes...

Ah. The web Internet Archive Wayback Machine confirms I was not
hallucinating:

http://web.archive.org/web/200602140034 ... shire.html

I guess it was thought too much of a bother to keep such pages current?
Pity this information is NOT on the online catalogue. Fortunately, the
Wayback Machine can be used to retrieve each county's similar page as of
sometime in 2005.

Er, Um.

Being a new trustee of said org, I thought I had better take this up.
First of all I had a look and, using the first of the above URLs, I was
shown a page which had lists of parishes and above each block is the
important message:

"The Society has material on the following and other places in the
county of Nottinghamshire. For details please click on the link to
the on-line catalogue and do a subject search for the place name."

So I clicked on the link immediately (in my display of the site) above
this message and it took me to the start of SOGCAT. At this point you
have to do something odd with the first field. You must click on the
menu icon and change this field from :

TI (All Titles)

to:

SU (Subject)

(The need for this slight convolution is because the catalogue engine is
a proprietary machine, based IIRC in the USA, which has enabled the
Society to put its catalogue on-line for much the same as the cost of
buying a then needed new server box which had been required to hold the
growing catalogue. It would have been prohibitively expensive to have a
customised facility for us.)

Then I entered the name of the village or town, Annesley in this case.
This brought up a long list of options and the top one was:

Annesley, Nottinghamshire

So I double clicked on that and it brought up the same information that
is on "each county's similar page as of sometime in 2005".

While this may require one or two more keystrokes, it does have the
advantage that this is the totally up-to-date catalogue as used by
staff and members of the Society from within the premises.

--
Tim Powys-Lybbe                                          tim@powys.org
             For a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/

Nathaniel Taylor

Re: parish register films - Society of Genealogists (London)

Legg inn av Nathaniel Taylor » 04 mai 2007 15:09:25

In article <f6c5acdd4e.tim@south-frm.demon.co.uk>,
Tim Powys-Lybbe <tim@powys.org> wrote:

In message of 4 May, Nathaniel Taylor <nathanieltaylor@earthlink.net> wrote:

Am I hallucinating, or did not the SoG formerly have a set of webpages
which listed the holdings of parish registers on microfilm, with years
covered, one page per county? I remember consulting such pages last
year. But what is now available is only a general list of parishes for
which the library purportedly has something, with an unhelpful link to
the online catalogue, with no information on PR films either on the
county page or in the online catalogue. Here is a sample of a current
page (Nottinghamshire); all the county pages are revised as of last fall
(November or thereabouts):

http://www.sog.org.uk/prc/nottinghamshire.shtml

...time passes...

Ah. The web Internet Archive Wayback Machine confirms I was not
hallucinating:

http://web.archive.org/web/200602140034 ... c/nottingh
amshire.html

I guess it was thought too much of a bother to keep such pages current?
Pity this information is NOT on the online catalogue. Fortunately, the
Wayback Machine can be used to retrieve each county's similar page as of
sometime in 2005.

Being a new trustee of said org, I thought I had better take this up.
First of all I had a look and, using the first of the above URLs, I was
shown a page which had lists of parishes and above each block is the
important message:

"The Society has material on the following and other places in the
county of Nottinghamshire. For details please click on the link to
the on-line catalogue and do a subject search for the place name."

So I clicked on the link immediately (in my display of the site) above
this message and it took me to the start of SOGCAT. At this point you
have to do something odd with the first field. You must click on the
menu icon and change this field from :

TI (All Titles)

to:

SU (Subject)

(The need for this slight convolution is because the catalogue engine is
a proprietary machine, based IIRC in the USA, which has enabled the
Society to put its catalogue on-line for much the same as the cost of
buying a then needed new server box which had been required to hold the
growing catalogue. It would have been prohibitively expensive to have a
customised facility for us.)

Then I entered the name of the village or town, Annesley in this case.
This brought up a long list of options and the top one was:

Annesley, Nottinghamshire

So I double clicked on that and it brought up the same information that
is on "each county's similar page as of sometime in 2005".

While this may require one or two more keystrokes, it does have the
advantage that this is the totally up-to-date catalogue as used by
staff and members of the Society from within the premises.

Yes, I see this now. But I did not miss the pointer to SOGCAT on the
newer version of these pages yesterday. Yesterday I attempted,
repeatedly, precisely those searches (searching for a particular parish
as subject entry), and came up empty for many, if not all, of the
particular parishes I typed in (there would be nothing matching that any
parish in a list of terse entries in the alphabetized field index). I
wonder if there was some sort of database downtime or indexing error?
Comparing search results now with what I saw yesterday, maybe there was
a period in which only cross-references were returned and no actual
hits. I would scroll up and down the alphabetical hit list from my
entry point and find only single line items with no enumeration of
records in the right hand column.

But right now it all works as it should and I agree that the
catalogue-entry level description of parish register holdings is
superior to the older page-per-county summaries. If the SOGCAT
experience I encountered yesterday is unknown to any others and
unrepeatable, perhaps that is what I hallucinated.

Nat Taylor
http://www.nltaylor.net

Tim Powys-Lybbe

Re: parish register films - Society of Genealogists (London)

Legg inn av Tim Powys-Lybbe » 05 mai 2007 00:14:05

In message of 4 May, Nathaniel Taylor <nathanieltaylor@earthlink.net> wrote:

<Snip on problems with the Society of Genealogists Catalogue>

But right now it all works as it should and I agree that the
catalogue-entry level description of parish register holdings is
superior to the older page-per-county summaries. If the SOGCAT
experience I encountered yesterday is unknown to any others and
unrepeatable, perhaps that is what I hallucinated.

I've found the probable problem:

At 20:00 01/05/2007 +0100, webmaster@sog.org.uk wrote:
Information[1 May 2007]

The Society's Online Library Catalogue- SOGCAT will be unavailable
from 8pm Thursday 3 May 2007 until at least 10am Friday 4 May due a
full re-index taking place. This is to improve the SOGCAT search
facilities. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

--
Tim Powys-Lybbe                                          tim@powys.org
             For a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/

Nathaniel Taylor

Re: parish register films - Society of Genealogists (London)

Legg inn av Nathaniel Taylor » 07 mai 2007 15:22:47

In article <e5b9efdd4e.tim@south-frm.demon.co.uk>,
Tim Powys-Lybbe <tim@powys.org> wrote:

In message of 4 May, Nathaniel Taylor <nathanieltaylor@earthlink.net> wrote:

Snip on problems with the Society of Genealogists Catalogue

But right now it all works as it should and I agree that the
catalogue-entry level description of parish register holdings is
superior to the older page-per-county summaries. If the SOGCAT
experience I encountered yesterday is unknown to any others and
unrepeatable, perhaps that is what I hallucinated.

I've found the probable problem:

At 20:00 01/05/2007 +0100, webmaster@sog.org.uk wrote:
Information[1 May 2007]

The Society's Online Library Catalogue- SOGCAT will be unavailable
from 8pm Thursday 3 May 2007 until at least 10am Friday 4 May due a
full re-index taking place. This is to improve the SOGCAT search
facilities. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Yes, that would explain it--I wasn't hallucinating. It's coincidental
that the first time I tried to use it it was down. Sorry to raise a red
flag needlessly--the SOGCAT works perfectly well and certainly provides
fuller information on parish records than the earlier county summary
pages.

Nat Taylor
http://www.nltaylor.net

Tim Powys-Lybbe

Re: parish register films - Society of Genealogists (London)

Legg inn av Tim Powys-Lybbe » 07 mai 2007 22:45:03

In message of 7 May, Nathaniel Taylor <nathanieltaylor@earthlink.net> wrote:

In article <e5b9efdd4e.tim@south-frm.demon.co.uk>,
Tim Powys-Lybbe <tim@powys.org> wrote:

In message of 4 May, Nathaniel Taylor <nathanieltaylor@earthlink.net> wrote:

Snip on problems with the Society of Genealogists Catalogue

But right now it all works as it should and I agree that the
catalogue-entry level description of parish register holdings is
superior to the older page-per-county summaries. If the SOGCAT
experience I encountered yesterday is unknown to any others and
unrepeatable, perhaps that is what I hallucinated.

I've found the probable problem:

At 20:00 01/05/2007 +0100, webmaster@sog.org.uk wrote:
Information[1 May 2007]

The Society's Online Library Catalogue- SOGCAT will be unavailable
from 8pm Thursday 3 May 2007 until at least 10am Friday 4 May due a
full re-index taking place. This is to improve the SOGCAT search
facilities. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Yes, that would explain it--I wasn't hallucinating. It's coincidental
that the first time I tried to use it it was down. Sorry to raise a red
flag needlessly--the SOGCAT works perfectly well and certainly provides
fuller information on parish records than the earlier county summary
pages.

It must be worth adding that these notices of events such as this are on
the NEWS, or announcements, mailing list of SoG. It can be subscribed
to by mailing SOG-NEWS-L-request@rootsweb.com with 'subscribe' in the
subject line - without the quote marks of course. It is low traffic with
no postings by subscribers to that list.

--
Tim Powys-Lybbe                                          tim@powys.org
             For a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/

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