Family
Search – Digital Reading Rooms
Since our arrival in Italy we have been working through the
process of securing logon's, permissions, programs, enhanced access, VPN connections,
computers, monitors, etc. etc. to work on digital reading rooms (DRR’s). As we have been working through this
process, we have kept ourselves busy checking missionary apartments (and making
needed repairs), capturing headstone images in Billion Graves, attending
missionary meetings, working with our MTC online language tutor, and generally figuring out how to live and function in
Italy.
As of July 10, we had everything in place to start creating
DRR’s. Anziano Ken and Sorella Pam King
have been training us and helping us learn the process. Creating DRR’s is essentially downloading
digitized images from Family Search (not currently accessible to the general public),
formatting the metadata associated with each image in a way that the Digital Reading
Room software can link the image and the metadata together for easy access and
viewing.
The beauty of a DRR is that it can be installed on a standalone computer which does not require internet access. Once the DRR has been created, we copy all of the necessary files to operate the DRR along with all of the images onto a hard drive or flash drive (depending on the size).
The next step is to send the prepared DRR to
the archive where the records reside and where the digital images were captured. Family Search has agreed with the
archives that the digital images won’t be published for two years or until after they
are published on the Italian Antenati website.
Needless to say, we are excited to be busy working on downloading
images and formatting the metadata so we can create digital reading rooms! This is what we envisioned we would be doing on our mission. To date we have created 20 DRR's. The first seventeen are from archives in the
Palermo, Sicily area and three are military registries for other locations.
The King’s warned us in advance, and we have learned first
hand, that the process for creating a digital reading room is not necessarily
straight forward. The process itself isn’t
the problem; the problem comes in formatting the metadata. Formatting the metadata is essentially done using
.csv files and manipulating the data in Excel spreadsheets. It turns out that there are many many ways
that the metadata can be corrupted and cause the formulas and macros in the
spreadsheet to fail. Unfortunately, we
don’t always know it hasn’t worked until we get to the final step and find that
all of the folders with images aren’t present or images won’t load in the
Digital Reading Room software. When this
happens we essentially have to search through the data for problems in the
process. It turns out that errant symbols
such as ( . ) : | “ null , : and tabs will cause problems. Even knowing this and searching for these in
advance doesn’t always find the problem.
Each digital reading room can present its own challenges, but in the end
when everything works, it is very satisfying.
Because this is kind of a complicated process, I thought
that I’d summarize and capture a few screen shots from the basic process.
It all starts in Family Search where we identify images that
we want to download.
Once we identify the images, then we download a file with
information about those specific images which comes in the form of a
searchResults.csv file. We have to then
format this file and clean out any unwanted images or data that might cause problems with the
DRR. We create a .txt file containing the folder number where the images are stored in Family Search.
.
We point Image Viewer to our .txt file with the folder numbers and the downloading process begins. Depending upon the number of folders and images, this can take hours and even days to complete the download - even with a high speed fiber internet connection. Image Viewer can be kind of quirky. For unknown reasons, it sometimes just stops downloading. It might download without problems or it might randomly stop minutes or hours into the downloading process. When this happens we need to identify where the download stopped and restart the process. We often sleep, eat or leave the apartment and still feel like we are working and making progress.
It is great to be downloading images and at the same time be off doing something else. For example, while finalizing this blog post, we are currently in the process of downloading 4856 folders containing 780,828 digital images for our next DRR !!
Once the download is complete, we move onto formatting the metadata. Fortunately for us, Family Search has hired some spreadsheet geniuses to create a Metadata File Maker that does most of the metadata formatting. I can only imagine the number of steps in the macros and formulas that this Metadata File Maker runs through to make the final metadata file.
Even with the Metadata File
Maker, we have some work to do. We must
ensure that all of the image folders are accounted for and make sure that we
adjust the data if there aren’t enough folders or if the download splits some of the image folders into multiple folders.
All the while we are looking over the data format as well as searching
for errant symbols that will cause the Digital Reading Room software to
fail. Family Search has also created a
Meta Tools program to assist when certain problems arise.
Assuming that everything looks good we move onto the Digital
Reading Room Software. We execute the program
and images upload into the DRR.
I practiced making a DRR for Oltre il Colle. Jodie is quite interested in this area as
this is one of the areas where her ancestors (Balsi and Ceroni) come from.
For there are many yet on the earth among all sects, parties, and denominations ... who are only kept from the truth because they know not where to find it—
A fun twist on this scripture which would relate to Family History might be:
For there are many no longer on the earth among all sects, parties, and denominations ... who are only kept from the truth because we know not where to find them—
