Hello Everybody,
since it’s been a few weeks (and it looks like my week will be pretty well shot thanks to jury duty) I wanted to give some updates on the various projects that I’m working on.
ADM8 Database
I think this project is tracking well to be finished in the winter/spring. Larry is trucking along transcribing reports in Vol II. We now have 178 reports Live (of about 240 total Deployment Reports), with another 30-40 reports ready to be checked and made live. I have decided that.. for the forseeable future, that will be the extent of things. Programming entire new things so that we can get the weird and wacky reports into the database would be difficult. I’m probably going to blog/write about them instead. There may be an exception that I’ll transcribe into manually, for example on in ADM8 vol 2 that lists everything down to warrant officers. That should be in there because it’s very cool and descriptive and I’ve got photos of the entire thing. And it’s unique, so I’ll probably write a blog about it too.
Along with making lots of reports live, I also need to start uploading photos (galleries) for the reports, so that people can see the photos of the documents next to (or below, really), the transcribed versions. There’s a lot to do there. And I have to figure out the lat/long for a bunch of locations (in terms of Where at Present- which includes both physical locations and things they are doing there – like “With the Queen of Spain” in 1689/90, or “With the Earl of Inchiquin” and things like that. So, plenty of work to do but I think all the things will be wrapped up before I go back to work at the end of March. I know this is – not doing Add/Removal Lists, not doing the fleet lists- that’s a loss from the original plan- but it’s important I think to put a good, completeable target so we can go ahead and really promote the existence of the database so people can make good use of it.
BR 1 Transcription
So I’ve stalled a bit at 42 pages transcribed this week after making a good charge through. There’s a total of 98 and a few lines, so I’m hoping to finish transcribing in January. Roy Metcalfe, who took the photos for me, has said he is willing to take more so hopefully he’ll get the versions from 1970 and 1972 for me (alas, there are no earlier versions otherwise I’ d love to have them instead. I’m going to have a good luck just in case.
BR1, p.1-43. Photo by Roy Metcalfe 2023. Held at Kew, National Archives ADM 234/1048
Here’s an example of what the transcription is like. Some places for shortcuts/copy and paste but just a lot a lot a lot of typing.
So in 42 pages there are 1471 individual line items, and the most recent item was BR 1766 (3). There’s been a lot of techy stuff, engineering and weapons manuals. I’m loathe to make any judgements based on only half the documents. but the stats will be really interesting at the end, looking at how much was from each sponsoring department. I also hadn’t appreciated when I started this project that this was only a few years after the Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry were all subsumed. combined into the Ministry of Defence. So I’ve been noticing a few joint things (like a standard for evaluating physical fitness), and a few cross-service things. Very interesting. I’m hoping to have this completely transcribed sometime in January, then uploaded into a database. No idea how I’m going to display it, other than a page at a time, and being able to search for departments and certain words. But if anybody has query ideas they’d like me to incorporate into the research interface, please do let me know.
ADM 10/10 and 10/15
This will tie into the existing database the time period in these officer lists very much covers the period of ADM 8 Volume 1, I have a fantastic volunteer for transcribing these documents (Thanks, Jess!). I will put her bio and photo up soon so we can thank her properly. She and I had a meeting a few days ago and we walked through the documents and the interface so far, and it seems good.
ADM 10/15 p2. Photo by David Davies
So as you can see this is really quite straight forward. The plan is to tie it in so that when, through the ADM8 Database, one chooses to look up all the references to a single person, or to a single ship, it’ll pull up the ADM 10/15 or ADM 10/10 references to those things as well. I was hoping to get the coding done this weekend by solo parenting and jury duty being moved from Tuesday to Monday, well I didn’t get it done. On the other hand I’m actually hoping to get it done this week. I’m at the tedious part of copying out all the variable names and field names for the SQL insert statement for actually saving the records into the database. So that should take a couple of hours, then comes testing. I think that actual transcription can take place next week. I’m quite happy to let Jess do as much as she wants and I’ll carry on from there. I’m kinda hoping that this data will be live (At least ADM 10/15) by the end of March as well.
So that’s an update on how the various projects are going. Stay tuned!
