ADM 8 Database Update and To-Do List.

Hello Everybody, 

once again it’s time to talk about what the plans are for the ADM 8 project. It’s been quite busy since our last update- while i had a good go with coding, my switch to working on the Ferries in Toronto meant that I didn’t have nearly as much time as i thought I would (funny how switching from 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off to working 5 days a week will do that). 

That said, now that I’ve been laid off I should have some more time to really get down to brass tacks. And without further ado, here’s the to-do list for ADM8. (Because if I post it on the website, I have to be held to it, right?)

1. Finish writing the code for finding and fixing the ship data- this is mostly issues with “not sure which ship this is” which slipped through checking, when we uploaded things. Again, this is mostly to do with hired vessels that only appear once, but it’s an interesting thing because It’s fixing data on the live server and I want to have a function programmed so I can adapt it in future, rather than doing everything in the back end.
2. Fix the problems in the data (see 1)
3. Make Reports Live: the lovely Larry has, I believe, finished transcribing all the Deployment reports in volume I. I absolutely want to get this done by Christmas, so that at least that first volume (covering July 1673- Glorious Revolution) can be up live and raring to go. This is just for Deployment reports, though.
4. Known Issues: This isn’t about issues in the data (to be fixed), but rather, known issues in the documents themselves. There’s a number that we’ve come across (pages bound in the wrong place (by several years), the wrong names being in the documents (when we know who the correct people are)) and that kind of thing. This is a page that we definitely want to be a “read this first before you use this database” kind of thing so that nobody has to go through the chore of figuring out the problem if we’ve already sorted it. Hopefully, as more issues in the original documents are identified we can continue to update the list.
5. Fix the Damn Petts: One of the first things I did, way back in the before times was manually transcribe fleet lists into csv files. We’ve only got two uploaded. There are 8 or 9 more to go. This fleet lists often list shipwrights. The problem is.. there’s a problem with the Petts. Some of them are assigned to the wrong Pett. And I had a duplicate account (I miscounted my Petts.. it seems to be a common issue) and then I deleted the wrong one. So the Petts need to be sorted out
6. Contemplate future code. Options include
   1. Code for transcribing Fleet lists in the web interface. This will probably involve taking the existing report copying it, then modifying the report (adding lines, deleting lines as necessary).
   2. Writing additional functions for researchers to use. Top of the list- a function for summarizing the Deployments reports- a list- per-report- how many ships (and men) in service. Basically, taking the Abstracts and lining them up all together, and adding abstracts where the reports themselves dont have them.
7. Finding a future stable platform for this website and project- things are getting expensive, quite frankly I need to find a stable, sustainable way to keep this going because I think this project in particular could be really useful.