Transcribers' Page

Welcome to the FreeBMD Transcribers' page.

This page provides information about issues associated with transcribing for FreeBMD and is therefore of interest to people who:

transcribe index pages,
manage syndicates (syndicate coordinators)
are involved in management of transcribing (e.g. corrections) and
help with the development of FreeBMD.

Unable to find the information you require? Try using our website search engine by clicking on the Explore logo:

Reporting Problems

If you experience errors while uploading data (or other website related problems), please report them to us at , saying what you were doing (i.e. submitting, searching), the URL and the exact time (and timezone) that this happened (including the text of any error messages). Thank you.

Please note that this address must not be used to report errors in the data held by FreeBMD. If you have a correction to an entry click click on the Info button button next to the entry and follow the instructions for submitting a correction.

If you have problems relating to your user id or syndicate (e.g. cannot contact syndicate coordinator) please contact the Volunteer Coordinator.

File Management

Statistics

Coverage Charts showing percentage FreeBMD coverage by quarter and event (last updated Friday, 24-Sep-2021 05:57:42 BST).
Index of Graphs showing the progress of the project. Possibly the most interesting is the total number of entries.
Entry totals giving the number of entries for each quarter.
Districts Information about Registration Districts, including volume and page mappings.
Transcriber information giving number of records contributed.

Transcriber Support & Resources

Hints & Help for Beginners. Help getting started with transcribing using the transcription software.
Submission Format. A definition of the formats for submitting entries using the transcription software or other means.
Transcribers' Knowledge Base Gives answers to many questions about transcribing and transcription software. If you are having problems, or need to ask a question about the transcriptions you are doing, check the Transcribers' Knowlege Base (TKB) first. Your question may already have been answered.
Comments. Details about how to add comments to transcriptions.
WinBMD Help. See the help file for WinBMD for details of using WinBMD, either from the Help menu in WinBMD or from the Program menu
How to read 19th Century Handwriting - a guide for transcribers.
FreeBMD News (last updated 30 June 2015).
Transcription Software Including WinBMD for Windows and MacBMD-X for Mac..
Syndicates and what that means.
Allocations Pages showing which syndicate is doing which page.
Where are the Indexes?. This is an incomplete list. Please help us to improve it.
Scans available for transcription. This is where you go to access scans if you are transcribing using this method.
Due to a lot of confusion over the transcribing of full stops (periods), all transcribers are asked to read this Policy Statement on the matter. For the definitive guide on transcribing full stops, please see here.

Communications

Mailing Lists. If you would like to become involved in the project, please join one of our mailing lists.
Search the FreeBMD List Archives
The #FreeBMD IRC Channel.
The website is constantly under development. We appreciate your feedback (note that this link will send an email to the Discuss mailing list).
See what people are saying about us on our Bouquets Page.

Advanced Information

Search comments. Search the comments in the database.
Search postems. Search the postems in the database.
Character set. Information on character sets used by FreeBMD.

Co-ordinator Resources

Hints for Co-ordinators
Syndicate maintenance Add new users to your syndicate.
Upload Report. Check files uploaded by transcribers in your Syndicate.
Syndicate Information. Gives information about syndicates, including syndicate statistics.
Show File. Gives read access to files uploaded by transcribers in your Syndicate (to download files see below).
Show File Differences. Reports the differences between two files, or between previous versions of a file.
Show File with download. Allows download of files uploaded by transcribers in your Syndicate.
Upload Errors. This listing gives the files that were rejected during the last update.
FreeBMD Ranges. This gives the events and periods allocated to each Syndicate.
Processes An overview of the steps that the project goes through to ensure data accuracy.
Access to Syndicate Members' Files Process for accessing Syndicate Members (i.e. transcribers' files.
Deletion of Submitter IDs Process for deleting submitter IDs of transcribers who have not uploaded files for some time.
Duplicate Files Check for the same file uploaded by more than one Syndicate Member.
Duplicate Syndicate Pages Check for pages transcribed by more than one member of a Syndicate.
Suspect Files A list of files uploaded by Syndicate Members that have some anomoly that needs to be checked (e.g. files with an unexpectedly small number of entries because only one column of a multi-column page has been transcribed). This now includes aliases in the Associate Name (previously in a separate list)
Suspect Files (with alias suspects) A list of files similar to Suspect Files (above) but including issues with aliases
Self Confirmed Files Check for entries uploaded by Syndicate Members more than once
Predict year/event/quarter for a file from the volume/page combinations in the file
UCF files A list of files that have a high usage of UCF characters
Multiple upload Facility upload multiple files in one operation
Superseded Files Listing of superseded files

Data Teams

In addition to Transcribers and Co-ordinators, FreeBMD uses the services of a small number of people in a number of teams who help to ensure that the accuracy of our data is improved. Some of these roles remain to be filled (an announcement will be made when we are looking for people)

District Alias Team - Co-ordinator Martin Cope
Query Investigation Team - Coordinator TBA
Data Checking Teams - Coordinator TBA
Resolution Teams - Coordinator TBA
Central Resolution Team - Coordinator TBA

Developer Resources

The FreeBMD Website is maintained by a small team of developers who help provide the facilities used by our large team of transcribers ... additional transcribers are always welcome! The pages in this section describe the development environment that we use, the processes involved, and include some files which are a useful reference for developers.

The software used to run FreeBMD.
Design Guide showing the standard format of FreeBMD Web pages.
HTML Preprocessor giving information about the use of the HTML preprocessor used for all FreeBMD static web pages.
Schedule of updates and handoffs (for FreeUKGEN).

The tools we use in the development process are CVS, a version control system, and Trac, a problem tracking system. Below is a list of helpfiles and tutorials for the various tools and methods of development used on FreeBMD

Development Process showing the process for controlling changes to FreeBMD.
CVS How it works
CVS Independent Mode A tutorial
CVS Cooperative Mode A tutorial
trac Managing changes for FreeBMD (instructions for the use of trac are on the home page of trac)

The following are list of references or tools that may be useful in diagnosing problems with the system

System Processes A guide to various processes provided for managing the system
Quality Assurance Processes A guide to how to use various system tools (described below) to identify, analyse and correct quality issues in the FreeBMD data
Show Records Facility to show records in the database from filename, chunk, accession, etc.
Show Accession Facility to show entries in the database from a particular accession.
Find file Facility to find a file, or files, from the filename (i.e. without knowing the userid).
Aliasing Tools Facilities for the Data Aliasing Team to help process district names and synonyms
Search for district synonyms Facility to search for the synonyms of a district (run offline and used with Aliasing Tools).
List deployed files Facility to display the name and revision number of every file deployed on the system
Make mail address Facility to create spam-proof mail addresses (as images) for incorporation into static and dynamic pages
Find page entries Facility to list all the pages for a particular quarter - this is linked to from the help pages for finding a missing spouse but could also be useful in diagnostic situations
Show update progress Facility to show the curent progress of the latest database update
Show synchronisation Facility to show the state of files currently being synchronised from master to slaves
Show state of handoff Facility to show the current states of a handoff of new files to the cluster
Show WinBMD statistics Facility to display the usage of different versions of the upload interface and the software (mainly WinBMD) used (has to search the logs so can be slow)
Show data file version Facility to display identifier of a data file (mainly used for the WinBMD districts file)
Show databases Facility to display the dates of all databases
Prepare gtml page Facility to convert a page from gtml to html (see gtml help)
Superchunk Report Listing of the superchunks for each quarter
Unaligned ONENAME report Listing, for all those quarters shown as nearly complete, of ONENAME transcriptions that have not been aligned
Unresolved links A listing of system entries using #THEORY,LINK that do not matched any entry in the database
Unresolved late entry references Unresolve references to late entries, that is references of the form see M/78M where the corresponding entry could not be found
Dropped Records A listing of those records that have been dropped from the database, mostly RANDOM records in completed quarters that have not been aligned
Inserted Records A listing of records, mainly RANDOM records, that have not been aligned to other records but have been inserted into search results
Misalignments A listing, by quarter, of records that have not been aligned but probably refer to the same entry (requires login)
Failed alignments A listing of alignments using #THEORY,ALIGN or MakeAlignments.pl that do not match any records
Manage Scans Utility to manage links to scans (requires login)
Syndicate Report Utility to produce a report on the details of syndicates (requires login, if coordinator (as opposed to admin) only shows syndicates of which the user is a coordinator)

FreeBMD Main Page

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