West Middlesex Family History Society

The Journal Digitisation Project

In 2015 the Executive Committee decided that putting copy of our journals on the website was a good use of our site, and Joan Scrivener (of West 4 printers and a life member of the Society) was able to assist by providing digital copy of our journals back to 2011. The ongoing project is to continue digitising our journals all the way back to when the Society (and the journal) started in 1978. As of January 2021 all journals back to March 1991 have been digitised.

The process involves obtaining hard copy of the journals to be digitised, and then scanning each page, approximately 160 pages per year, to a suitable folder. That's the easy part. The next stage in the process is to use an OCR program to read each of the scanned pages and turn them into text, and to use the text so created to build a journal that looks as much like the original as is reasonable to achieve. While creating the new journal any pictures need to be separately extracted from the original scanned images, and then get pasted (inserted) into the new copy. So it's long-winded and technical, but at the same time very satisfying to see the new journal being rebuilt without much typing. You get to be a total whiz on the Word for Windows options to fit text into the available space, and you get to browse the content as you go along. You definitely need to do a quick proof-read as you will find dates such as 2017 are likely to have been morphed into ZOl7, and much else besides.

If this is the sort of work you fancy then please contact the Projects Co-ordinator.