An insider blog about the history website, Footnote.com
Nov 20th, 2009 by sharbrough
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 that title.
Today, let’s discuss the percentage of completion.
Nov 9th, 2009 by sharbrough
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, Footnote.com will add more than 9.5 million images featuring over half a billion names to its extensive online record collection. With over 60 million historical records already online, Footnote.com will use the U.S. Census records to tie content together, creating a pathway to discover additional records that previously have been difficult to find. “We see the census as a highway leading back to the 18th century,” explains Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “This Census Highway provides off-ramps leading to additional records on the site such as naturalization records, historical newspapers, military records and more. Going forward, Footnote.com will continue to ad valuable and unique collections that will enhance the census collection.”How much interaction is interactive?
Nov 6th, 2009 by sharbrough
Part 4 of 4
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.
Nov 5th, 2009 by sharbrough
Part 3 of 4
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 remembered Peter’s comments while looking for my missing Frank’s, and it led me to try something else – searching. I thought, “I’ll just search LA directories for surnames starting with SH.” I figured that since FN keys the first surname on the page, that there might be some starting with “SH” that I could go to, and then browse from there – or even just page to the area where the Sharbroughs might be found.
Nov 4th, 2009 by sharbrough
Part 2 of 4
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.
Nov 3rd, 2009 by sharbrough
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 named Frank F Sharbrough. His great-grandfather, Malachi Sharbrough, was my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. That’s not important. What’s important was that I knew a bit about the structure of Frank Frazier Sharbrough’s family tree, and wanted to see how the LA city directories could improve my understanding of his life. Continue Reading »
Oct 19th, 2009 by sharbrough
I keep a list of titles from the National Archives that have been published on Footnote.com. The list has been updated. These updates take place on a random schedule, and this one is waaaaay overdue.
Next time, I may add the “% complete” from Footnote – it seems like about the same amount of work.
The list can be found here.
Oct 19th, 2009 by sharbrough
Footnote has announced a new collection, the Holocaust Collection. It was created in partnership with the National Archives (NARA) and the Holocaust Museum (USHMM). Access to the collection is free during October 2009.
What is it?
The collection is divided into four parts: Stories, Concentration Camps, Looted Valuables, and NARA records.
Apr 20th, 2009 by sharbrough
Many people are not familiar with City Directories. I tell them that it’s like a phone book, before there were phone numbers in them. That’s too simple, and I’d like to describe them a bit more now.
I’m very fond of a book that contains an entry like, “Brown, Sarah widow of Samuel.” You can generally find a person, their occupation, and their place of residence in these directories. But sometimes, as in the case above, you find a relationship. I always thought it would be interesting to take all of the employees with the same employer and map their residences and workplace and imagine their daily trip to and from work. Perhaps I’d want to know which bars are on the way.
Many directories are a sort of combined white pages and yellow pages – they have a residential and a business section. The business section is often “classified” – Barbers, Brewers, Cigar Makers, and so on. Back when I was an undergraduate philosophy major, I wondered about this system of classification. Who determined what classifications would be used, an how? When I got older, I found that the publisher would sell a listing in any (or as many) classifications as a business liked. Perhaps it was always that way, but certainly the classification itself is not to be confused with Linnaen Taxonomy.
Some also possess a Street and Avenue section, which shows the names of the residents or businesses in a given block.
Apr 14th, 2009 by sharbrough
This is the unofficial Footnote Blog. There is also an official Footnote Blog. On 30-March, when Footnote rolled the 1930 Census, they also announced enhancements to the search function on the site. The announcement said, in part:
Search Updates
We’ve received some great feedback about searching Footnote and we’ve made some significant improvements based on your suggestions. The new search results page makes it easier to narrow or broaden, refine and change your search. Now you can select the kinds of results you want and remove or add matches found though OCR (Optical Character Recognition–the computer read text of newspapers, city directories and other typed documents). You’ll also find an improved quicklook and an option to add an image to a Footnote Page right from the search results. This intro video provides more details about the new search.
Let’s review these changes.
The Unofficial Footnote Blog
An insider blog about the history website, Footnote.com
There are 45 Posts and 21 Comments so far.
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