making indexing easier
It seems that the indexing could be made easier and faster... Remove fields like the prefix before someone's given name. Do we need Mr, Mrs, Ms ?? many entries end up with from 4 to 8 blank entries. I usually move them all to the bottom and blank they all out at one time. much more accurate and confusing for me.
prefixes look unnecessary to me. Don Robinson
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None of the indexing projects I've ever worked on ever had a prefix field. Heck, the current iteration of the Slovakia church books project doesn't even have a surname field for the child.
I'm not sure what you mean about blank entries and grouping them: do you mean that when the template has more entries than the image, you think you're supposed to leave them there? You're not: you're supposed to delete the unneeded entries. For example, in the screenshot, you can see that the template has 25 entries, but the page only happens to have 17 baptisms on it, so I'll be deleting eight entries. The number of entries in the template is determined when a project is set up, based on the material being indexed; when the contents of an image can vary, it's a tradeoff between sometimes needing indexers to add entries versus sometimes needing them to delete entries. Indexers have trouble with both, but leaving unneeded entries blank is a lesser evil than having part of the page unindexed because the indexer didn't know how to add more. Therefore, most projects err on the side of more entries in the template.
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Prefixes can be necessary in the context of female names. Through the 1960's in the US, women often used their formal name after marriage, Mrs. John Doe, for instance. Some of us still do!
I think the reason why this is done on some collections is so people feel more comfortable indexing Given Name: John; Surname: Doe; Prefix: Mrs. There have been many questions about how to index a name when the husband's name is used as the wife's formal name. So, having the prefix field, MIGHT encourage the indexer to at least index the prefix with a surname, i.e., Mrs. Doe.
We have been told that the owners of the records work with the project managers and determine what they want to have indexed. So while we might feel they are useless, it may be what the "customer" requested. Or, as above mentioned, maybe it is just a better understanding of how indexers treat data, developed from years of reviewing massive amounts of indexed records and seeing that indexers/reviewers often missed "Mrs. John Doe". I would guess that they also realized that on Church Records, the child's surname is rarely written on the documents, thus, the field was left off in the collection that Julia discussed. If the child does have two names, then they would be indexed in the Given Name field.
Moving the fields and globally "blanking" them using the copy text forward tool is very helpful. When Indexing you can also hide the fields that you know that won't be used. Of course, one should globally "blank" the fields before hiding them, or the batch can't be submitted. (Click on the three dots in the blue "Image 1 or 1" bar and "Show and Hide Fields". ) The tool can't be used in Reviewing.
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