Midlands Historical Data News : 02/10/2003

• More about this project
• Latest CD Releases

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1. More about our project 

This is only our fourth newsletter, so we hope that it is useful. We would welcome any feedback on any aspect of this newsletter, of the web-site or of the CD's themselves, so please let us have your comments - constructive or otherwise !  You can use this link to provide feedback: mailto:enquiries@midlandshistoricaldata.org  

All Dudley Archives Directories now scanned
It has been some time since our last newsletter, since we have been tidying up following completion of scanning the directories at Dudley Archives. The last directoires that we scanned were Blocksidge's Almanack, and we now offer a complete run (complete in the sense that all those that survive are now on CD) at a very special price - so if you are interested in the Dudley area then this is for you. We aim to move on to other locations and provide similar runs of Almanacks and Directories where we can obtain them.

All the directories we have scanned will be made available for public viewing at each of the libraries in the Dudley area shortly via their public access PC's. These libraries will also be offering CD's for sale. However, for many of you who cannot travel to these libraries our web-site will continue to be the best place to purchase.

Improved OCR - means we plan to offer a searchable index to books
We have now obtained a much improved optical character recognition program which gives significantly better results than anything else we have seen or tried. After training the software, it recognises about 95% of the text of most books. This means that we can build searchable indexes of much better quality for our collection of books on CD. If we were to put such an index on our web-site as a database, you would be able to see how many occurences of, say, a name, exist in a book before purchasing - which we think is a considerable step forward. Whilst the 95% accuracy of the index isn't perfect, it is good enough to make building such an index worthwhile, and we plan to do so.

Stourbridge Library & BMI next
Having completed scanning directories at Dudley Archives we are moving on to Stourbridge Library and the Bimingham and Midlands Institute. Stourbridge Library have a number of directories of particular local interest. The Birmingham and Midland Institute maintain the oldest library in Birmingham which was established even before the Birmingham Central Reference Library, and have many outstanding early books on Birmingham. More on both in our next Newsletter which will not be another month in preparation. Promise.

Thank you for your support
The project is funded through sales of CD's, so our thanks go to each of you who have purchased our CD's.  Please continue to support the project by buying the CD's, as with continued funding we can continue to expand the range of directories available. Any comments you have on the CD's will be welcome.  We can only continue to survive by pleasing you, our customers, so please let us have your views - good and bad. 

In passing, if any of you want a copy of a specific directory, do let us know via the feedback link, and we will see what we can do to track it down. In time, we aim to publish the Newsletter on a fortnightly basis, but for the first few issues will probably do this on a monthly basis.