Thursday 2 June 2010, 11:00 (UK time), Meeting Room 1, New Register House

Transcription

1 ScotlandsPeople User Group Seventeenth meeting Thursday 2 June 2010, 11:00 (UK time), Meeting Room 1, New Register House Minutes In attendance: NRS George Mackenzie (Chair) Dee Williams Steve Bordwell Raymond Evans Eileen Thomson Brightsolid Richard Callison Alison Wallace ScotlandsPeople User Group David Webster John McCurdie Andrew Paterson Ken Nisbet Marie Dougan Sue McBeth (by teleconference) Jean Pendexter (by teleconference) Alan Stewart (by teleconference) Jan Gow (by teleconference) 1. Apologies and Introductions Apologies were received from Andy Keogh. George Mackenzie introduced himself to the Group. 2. Matters arising from the previous minutes There were no matters arising. 3. Valuation Rolls testing Raymond reported that the Group had been given the opportunity to test the 1855 Valuation Rolls and Alison confirmed that some valuable input and comments had been received.

2 Ken said that he was of the opinion that 1855 was not the best year to launch the Valuation Rolls because the earlier years contain less information of interest to family historians than the latter years and he asked if a second roll could be launched, possibly There was a general agreement to this suggestion, particularly regarding any such later year being as modern as possible. NRS and brightsolid to consider issuing another year, possibly 1915, in conjunction with census including availability of Scottish 1911 census data on other websites and other formats Ken questioned why the 1911 census was not available in other formats rather than solely on ScotlandsPeople, as he has been questioned by members of various family history societies about the unavailability of microfilm. George said that 1911 was not available on microfilm and that a statement to this effect could be placed on the website. Ken explained that some Family History Societies wanted to create street indexes for those towns not already covered by the 1911 digitised street index books. NRS confirmed that they had no plans to create any more street indexes for Ken also asked about free access to the header pages for each enumeration book for all census years, which describe the enumeration district covered by the book. He was keen for these pages to be freely available to customers because it would help them evaluate whether they were interested in that particular book. Alison said that it was not possible at the moment to readily create free access to the header pages without the customer initially using credits to search the indexes. After some discussion it was clearly agreed that consideration would be given to digitising the available census street indexes for the 1841 to 1901 censuses, and making these available on-line at ScotlandsPeople NRS to draft message about the unavailability of microfilm for the census and brightsolid to then place message on website.. 5. Availability of microfilm or equivalent formats for Scottish and overseas Family History Societies. It was reported that Family History Societies can buy microfilm from the LDS at a cheaper rate than used to be available within New Register House.

3 6. Availability of Scottish BMD index and images, as well as 1841 to 1901 census images on other websites David asked what, if any of the records would be made available on other websites. George said that the BDM s were exclusively the property of NRS and that there are no plans to make those available elsewhere. He did say that the availability of census data to other organisations under a license agreement may be possible in the future and that transcriptions could be permitted. Ken explained that many searchers used both Ancestry and Find my Past to look at indexes and then switched to ScotlandsPeople to view the original images index information available on the LDS Family Search Website. David reported that a couple of months ago, the Scottish 1881 census info was available for a few days on the LDS FamilySearch website, but was withdrawn a few days later. He asked if the 1881 index info would ever become available on the LDS FamilySearch website? Neither NRS nor brightsolid were aware that this had occurred and thought that it was probably an error and that there were no plans to have further dialogue with the LDS on this topic. 8. Potential ScotlandsPeople Upgrades David had produced a paper prior to the meeting. 8.1 Statutory Birth Indexes Mother s Maiden Name David said that from 1929 in all registration districts, 1928 in the case of a few RDs, the birth indexes contain the mother s maiden surname. A cross check search using the married and maiden surnames was already available at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh and that such a cross-check search is a very powerful tool. David said that it should be straightforward to add such a cross-check search to and that in his opinion the amount of coding should be minimal. brightsolid said that the addition of the cross check search was possible but that this was not currently available due to security concerns about displaying information about mother s maiden name worldwide. If the proposal was such that the customer has to insert the mother s maiden name and that this information would not be returned in the search return table, this change could be considered for the website.

4 NRS and brightsolid to consider what changes are necessary to allow customers to insert the mother s maiden name as a search criteria but for the search returns not to display the mother s maiden name. 8.2 Death Indexes Mother s Maiden Name David reported that the ability to search the death indexes on a cross-check basis using the married and maiden surnames was added some time ago. From 1974 onwards the death indexes include the maiden surname of the mother of the deceased and that again this is a very powerful forward search tool. He said that the help text on the website was not sufficiently clear about the status of the work currently underway to add the mother s maiden name to the death index for the years prior to The text needs to explain that work was underway, however, this would be a very slow on-going task. NRS to provide additional text to brightsolid for putting on to the website about the status of adding the mother s maiden name on the death index prior to 1974 and to provide details of the years and RD s that had been added. 8.3 Census Indexes Second Person Forename David referred to the census search option that makes it possible to add a second forename for the same household. If everyone is included on the same page of the enumeration book, it is a very powerful search tool. However, households can exist across more than one page and in these instances a zero result will be returned because the system will only provide results for the forenames included on the same page. David suggested a plus minus one page option as a possibility such that the system would return all results across 3 pages. Richard and Alison and others around the table felt that this addition would simply result in customer complaints because customers would pay to view images that didn t include all of their search criteria. The addition of a tick box was also discussed but again it was felt that this would simply confuse customers. 8.4 Census Index Additional Fields David said that the point has been made many times previously that other sites, such as Ancestry, now allow searches based on more fields than is possible on ScotlandsPeople. George said this would be a large task which would involve a lot of staff resource, but that we could consider in the future. David suggested that he canvas the User Group to produce a poll of suggested improvements. This was agreed. 8.5 Census Address index Books

5 David reported that there are index books held by GROS for the 1841 to 1901 censuses that list addresses in these censuses and show which registration district contain the addresses. In 1841 these index books covered just the 4 cities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, but by 1901, however, most large urban areas, including most towns of any size, large and small, were covered. He suggested that the digitisation and indexing of the census address books should be regarded as a high priority project, quite possibly an even higher priority project than the current focus on Valuation Rolls. NRS to consider whether they have the resources to digitise the remaining street index books in the same manner as the 1911 books.. 9. Subscription Service Ken raised the issue once again of the introduction of a subscription service on ScotlandsPeople which was available on other family history websites. He said that this was something that the Family History Societies wanted, but not at a prohibitive cost comparable to that of a yearly pass in the ScotlandsPeople Centre. George said that with the introduction of the Kirk Session Records on to ScotlandsPeople in the future, that this could be used to test, and evaluate a subscription service, but that there were no immediate plans to make such a service available for the other data sets for a number of business reasons. 10. Transcription of the Scottish Census Material on Find my Past This was covered within item Ages at Death John asked if it was possible to use volunteers to speed up the process of completing the lengthy exercise of adding the ages at death from 1860 to Dee said that this was not possible due to security restrictions involving non Scottish Government staff and the SCOTS system. She also said that NRH staff were working on an ad hoc basis on the catch up exercise, but that progress was limited. John had calculated that a single member of staff, working an hour per week, could have now completed the task. Steve also reported that the work on the new index management system should be completed shortly and would be passed to brightsolid. 12. Future Role of the ScotlandsPeople User Group George told the Group that now was perhaps the time for a form of rationalisation which would see the ScotlandsPeople User Group, and the ScotlandsPeople Centre User Group merge into one new group, leaving another body available to concentrate on remote testing. Ken was against this proposal on the basis that he felt that the Centre User Group had no interest in the website and were solely interested in what happened within the Centre.

6 David also felt that an occasional meeting of the group in its current format would be of value, whereas Marie like the idea of a merged group. George asked the members to submit their views on such a proposal to Dee by the end of June 13. Any other business 13.1 Wills, The question of the issue of the next tranche of wills and testaments was raised. Dee said that the work of linking the images to the index was not yet complete, and that staff within General Register House had been concentrating on other issues such as the Valuation Rolls Andrew s Paper Andrew highlighted some of the errors that had not as yet been rectified. Steve said that the completion of the index management system should provide a fix. George thanked Andrew for his efforts in bringing those errors to the attention of NRS and brightsolid Statistics David had asked that the meeting be given up-to-date statistics on the number of folk signed up to ScotlandsPeople, including their geographical distribution, etc. Alison tabled those statistics Conversion rates Jean submitted a paper prior to the meeting pointing out that the real price of buying ScotlandsPeople credits can vary depending on the strength of the currency of the country that the customer lives in. It was apparent that in South Africa, for example, that the weakness of the Rand made it more expensive for South African customers to buy credits than other countries. Richard said that this was an issue of currency fluctuations. World Pay operate the payments system and a multi currency option was a possibility, but he doubted it would make much difference for customers in weaker currency areas Blue Paper Andrew raised the issue of the missing images in the 1851 census and the 1930 marriages.. This will be resolved when the indexes are updated during the next few months Meeting Communications Sue commented that she was able to hear the proceedings from afar, far better than she had been in the past End of book indexes Andrew asked if these could be made available. Richard said that this was a possibility

7 13.8 Cookies John raised the issue, on behalf of Andy, to ask if anyone was looking into the Cookie legislation under the EU "E-Privacy" directive and more specifically, how it will affect the browsing experience for SP users. Richard said that he was looking at the new European Legislation on this but he did not envisage a major issue Testing Alison for brightsolid and George for NRS thanked the Group members for all their efforts in testing. Raymond Evans National Records of Scotland Scotlandspeople New Register House Edinburgh EH1 3YT