The Unofficial Footnote Blog

Two quick lists for today.
The 10 titles which are 100% complete, containing less than 1000 images

Photos – WW II Japanese FREE
Civil War Soldiers – Union – UT
Ardelia Hall Collection: Wiesbaden Photographs FREE
Custer’s Court Martial FREE
Constitutional Convention Records FREE
Foreign Letters of the Continental Congress FREE
Photos – Coolidge FREE
Photos – Eisenhower FREE
Amistad – Federal court records FREE
Town [...]

Read Full Post »

Footnote publishes many numbers. For instance, the home page contains the total number of images – just above 60 million today. They also display the percentage that a title is complete, in some cases. When you view the “title index page” for a title, you will see the number of images published to date for [...]

Read Full Post »

Footnote recently announced that they will publish the complete US census.
The Footnote announcement, in part:
Today Footnote.com announced it will digitize and create a searchable database for all publicly available U.S. Federal Censuses, ranging from the first U.S. Census taken in 1790 to the most current public census from 1930. Through its partnership with the National Archives, [...]

Read Full Post »

Part 4 of 4
Annotation and Finding
When searching for data that has been OCR’d, you can often locate, once the page is in the viewer, with FIND. If the information has not been OCR’d or indexed, you may wish to make an annotation, so that you can find it more easily later.

Read Full Post »

Part 3 of 4
Here’s what worked
When I worked at Footnote, I used to routinely pester Peter Drinkwater about the shortcomings of the browse experience. Peter was kind enough to listen to me, and he used to tell me that they weren’t likely to do anything with browse because Search enhancements were going to replace it.
I [...]

Read Full Post »

Part 2 of 4
I had problems
I had searched the LA city directories for Francis Sharbrough, but I was pretty sure that half of the entries were not OCR’d properly, and would require a browse to find the page for the Sharbroughs. It was a good idea, even if it wasn’t very practical.

Read Full Post »

Part 1 of 4
It’s not a secret. I’m a big fan of City Directories. Footnote has a lot of them. But it’s not always as easy to find what you’re looking for as one might wish. I’ve spent some time fooling with this, and I have some suggestions for you.
I have a very distant cousin [...]

Read Full Post »