Scotsman archive - update on subscription version

[Lindsay]

Not sure if many use this but the subscription version of the Scotsman archive has been down since at least the start of May. You can still do searches but if you view the results you just get a message that the site is being transferred.

I contacted them May 7 for an update and then again this week at the site is still down. Apparently it will now be mid-July (to be confirmed) before the archive is available again. The website still just has the same vague message as when it first went down "If you are looking to view the archive, please visit us again soon, when we hope to have the service back up and running". I have been promised an extension on my subscription when it is back.

I'm lucky I can also access the institutional version but I find the search there a bit clunky and just much prefer the paid version

[Currie]

Thanks for the info Lindsay. I wonder if things will be any different with the new site.

It’s been quite a few years since I got any further than the search results at the Scotsman Archives. I’ve been meaning to compare the results there with the institutional version to see if there was any difference but haven’t got around to it. There probably wouldn’t be much of one, if any.

I’m probably too mean to drive anything but the ‘free’ version, even if it had square wheels.

All the best,
Alan

[Lindsay]

You would think there would not be much difference in terms of the search, but it is actually huge. I do lots of searches where I'm fishing for information on possible accidents and I don't know any information at all, or even if there was an accident. The paid version pulls up many more results.

Just to give an idea a really general search would be for "miner killed" as a phrase. Paid archive finds 607 results, Proquest version finds only 436. That makes the paid version worthwhile to me. The other thing is I don't like the fact that the Proquest version uses PDFs, but I would get used to that if I trusted the quality of the search engine

[Currie]

Thanks Lindsay,

Next time I get a zero or thereabouts result for something I know is there I’ll check the search on the other site to see if the result dates give me any clues.

I think the ‘exact phrase’ button at the Scotsman Digital Archive may bring up words in close proximity rather than as a real ‘exact phrase’. I don’t know if that’s the same if you enclose the phrase within quotes.

PDF’s are okay if it’s something like a book but I don’t like them as single pages. If there’s no easier way I'll take screen shots and stitch them together if necessary. GIMP will extract images from pdf’s but I’m not sure if that would work satisfactorily with newspapers.

All the best,
Alan

[Lindsay]

Not sure I ever noticed proximity matching as a problem - but obviously can't check at the moment. Obviously for my type of searching I don't really care if I effectively get "miner killed" and "miner was killed" from the same search (that search was just an easy example to give). I'd rather expend my efforts checking the wider search, just in case. Just really frustrating as I have a new search strategy which pulled out more than 100 new pre-1855 fatal accidents in the British Newspaper Archive and I really want to run it in Scotsman too.

Actually the only site that really frustrates me is the British Newspaper Archive which insists on matching miner to mineral

[trish1]

...

PDF’s are okay if it’s something like a book but I don’t like them as single pages. If there’s no easier way I'll take screen shots and stitch them together if necessary. GIMP will extract images from pdf’s but I’m not sure if that would work satisfactorily with newspapers.

All the best,
Alan

Hi Alan

I use Irfanview to convert PDF images to jpg or whatever - useful when I want to do something further with the image whether it be crop, rotate or imbed it in a word doc.

Trish

[Currie]

Thanks Trish,

I just gave Irfanview a try and you need the plug-ins as well as Ghostscript for it to work.

The conversion seems to work okay on most pdf’s, and is easier to learn than GIMP, and I’ll probably use it in future. With the Scotsman images it doesn’t appear to work nearly as well and I’ll stick with screenshots for those.

And Lindsay, the British Newspaper Archive also matches William to Williams which destroys the search if you’re looking for the surname.

All the best,
Alan

[SarahND]

And Lindsay, the British Newspaper Archive also matches William to Williams which destroys the search if you’re looking for the surname.

Ouch!! That makes it just about useless for any patronymic surnames. Another problem is surnames that are also words, like Black or White, etc.

All the best,
Sarah

[Lindsay]

I really hope that when the upload phase is finished they make some of the searches more user friendly. My wish list is:

-Proper exact match option
-Ability to search groups of newspapers (I want to do all/selected Scottish papers not by region)

But really the whole initative is great and I'm glad to see some recent activity on Scottish additions. I am actually ashamed how lazy electronic access made me - I used to think nothing of spending a morning trawling page by page through an entire film