Partially, this is a quick update to say that I’ve finshed 71 pages (of 98 and a bit) of BR1 (1968) and yes, the OCR technique that I’ve been using really speeds things up. Only OCRing the volume titles section (Column 4) has really simplified the task, and cleaned u the actual product of the OCR, although when individual titles run on multiple lines, it can get a bit messy. Plus the OCR website I’ve been does some annoying things with the punctuation and spacing. For example it’ll use H /B instead of H/B, and removing spaces other places- particularly where numbers are followed by letters. It’s extremely frustrating but I persevere. And to be honest.. at this point, it doesn’t really matter since I plan to have each page displayed along with the photo of the page- so minor text things can be seen.
I think the next post I’m going to write will be about my editorial decisions, since they are.. well there are a few. And they’re for my own sanity, as much as anything else.
The other bit is that the lovely, wonderful, generous Roy Metcalfe has gone to Kew and taken photos of *three* additional BR1 catalogues. These are the catalogues from 1951, 1970, and 1972. Eventually, of course, I’ll want to have them all up in a database, for cross comparison.
It strikes me, again, that I’m doing the same thing I did with my PhD- working with the lists of sources, and what do the lists tell me, rather than what do the sources themselves tell me. I was told this was an archaeological approach. Which is probably what happens when you’ve watched too much Time Team, like I have.
Anyways, of course I’m going to share them. I’ll do them up properly as discuss-a-doc posts when I have a minute (my whole family has been sick 2 of the last 3 weeks, so I don’t feel like I have very many minutes), but I’m absolutely going to share some photos here.
So first, the BR1 from 1951. This one is critically important to me because there’s a huge amount of time, and all kinds of technological and administrative changes between 1951 and 1968. Not just the creation of the MOD and the UK version of Unification (If you’re a Canadian military historian, you know), but all that cold war stuff. More radars and tech and nuclear submarines and all kinds of nonsense (defined broadly).
So here we have 3 consecutive pages chosen at random. Already, I’ve been thrown for a loop. It’s a completely different format than the 1968 edition. Where in 1968 the Catalogue and Allowances/Establishment are in two separate parts of the document, here they are the same. Thankfully, I’ve not yet constructed the database, so I have time to think about how to do it to best suit both. I hadn’t been intending to transcribe the allowances for 1968, to be honest.
Now an example from the 1970 BR1
As you can see, this looks pretty similar to the 1968 version. So this should be pretty simple to incorporate.
And here’s an example from 1972.
Things change yet again. And if we’re telling the truth, we can see something in how these change. These documents become less and less booklike, more and more print-out like, which is something I’ll have to investigate. But I think this format change will make the 1972 edition much more difficult to transcribe. Where the others seems like they were – set, printed- the 1972 seems like it was done on a printer. Badly worded but I have a guess there.
Anyways. that’s the current state of the project. Not in disarray, but as always more information brings more questions.
