A word or two of explanation will help here!
When General Register Office Scotland started out on the
DIGROS project, -
Digitisation of the
Records
of
Scotlands People, - more than a decade ago (and don't ask what happened to the "P", - I have no idea :-), they were faced with some interesting choices in terms of digitisingthe statutory BMD records.
The main choices were...............
(a) work from the existing microfiche, accepting the quality of the microfiche, and set up the scanner for a batch of microfiche rather than altering settings for each microfiche, or even parts of microfiche. Advantage: cost only £a ("£a" = a few 100k, maybe even £1.??m). Disadvantage: A number of the digitised images would not be of acceptable quality.
(b) as (a), but optimise the scanner settings per fiche or even part-fiche. Advantage: many fewer low quality images. Disadvantage: cost now between 5 x £a to 10 x £a; but still a proportion of images of unacceptable quality due to the quality of the original microfiches, some of these deriving from the deterioration, for various reasons, of the original registers.
(c) work from the original registers, optimising the image for each register page. Advantage: very few low quality images. Massive disadvantage: Cost now anything up to 25 x £a; plus considerable concern on the part of the responsible GROS archivist in relation to the effect of the required handling process on the older registers.
The economics of the DIGROS project only made sense if option (a) was selected. And the whole self-funded DIGROS project (no outside involvement such as GSU) only went ahead on the basis of The Scottish Office consideration of the proposal, as The Scottish Office was, at the time, taking it on faith that there would be a worthwhile ancestral tourism spin-off.
But GROS then accepted when the images originally went on line via ScotsOrigins that there would be a number of customers dissatisfied with the image that they had purchased, so set up a system to deal with this, as evidenced by what Clair found to be the case above.
Incidentally, initially, several years' marriage register images were initially withheld, as a proportion of the digitised images for these years were of such bad quality that GROS considered it to be counter-productive to put these on-line, with a later refilming of the years in question to follow at some future date.
I understand that, following representations from the ScotlandsPeople User Group, that these images were eventually put on line, following the major power loss problem at ScotlandonLine some months ago, when all the SP images had to be reloaded, and these few years' images were not then deleted for the ScotlandsPeople site. The UG apparantly argued that, as a proportion of these images were perfectly satisfactory, that the full years' images should be put on line.
As unsatisfactory images are identified, there is a GROS programme to refilm/digitise these, but this programme has to compete for resources and finance with many other GROS demands on the resources involved, so that it will be quite a few years before the situation is reached where there are no images of unnaceptable quality on the ScotlandsPeople website at
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk , or its successor, as the contract comes up for extension/renewal in the not too distant future.
Were GROS to have only initiated a DIGROS project today, then the tremendous advance in digitisation technology of the last decade or so would have meant that there would have been nothing like the same proportion of images of unacceptable quality, but that has to be regarded as a "council of perfection", and I'm sure that there are 100,000s of researchers out there who are very thankful for the decisions taken by GROS and The Scottish Office over a decade ago.
I'm still waiting for someone to convince me that there is another country in the whole world that can match the on-line indexes and digitised images of Scotland .........
In case anyone, and very sadly, there are such people out there, who see me as an apologist for GROS, ScotlandonLine, and ScotlandsPeople, the simple answer is "No way!!", - there are few more merciless and unrelenting critics than me, but in a wholly positive sense, of the policies and activities of GROS in relation to the ScotsOrigins, latterly ScotlandsPeople website access to the
records of Scotland's people !! Surely only reasonable for a Scottish resident and UK taxpayer who is an expert genealogist, in terms of where a proportion of "my" tax take is being spent??
Getting back to the theme of Clare's post, if there is any problem in terms of interpreting an image purchased and downloaded from ScotlandsPeople then the mantra is "Submit a Contact Form", and you will receive the same level of service as experienced by Claire.
<more to follow, due to RootsChat limit on 5,500 characters !!>
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Topic: It pays to complain... (Read 2388 times)