Microfilm Navigation (not content) Indexing
I work with scanned church book microfilms quite a lot mainly from Polish, Ukrainian and Russian language records.
Often an individual film may contain multiple years and a mix of say birth, marriage, and death info with corresponding index finish pages together with pages before and after the actual records.
Some microfilms have pages scanned in the order you would expect, either as is individual pages or page pairs. Finding the correct section, year year and record is hit and miss but reasonable.
Others have left hand pages scanned separate to right hand pages, and one-half of this may or may not be in reverse order making navigation a bit of a nightmare.
My suggestion if implemented will.
· Save your server bandwidth due to less need for hit and miss navigation
· Pave the way for full indexing records by making records easier to navigate
· Improve user experience
My idea is to add tag that can be associated with each scanned image that can be selected/input by uses as they use records. (I am sure many users like me would prefer to input the navigation info we already have to note down ourselves into Family Search for all to use rather than in our individual note books).
Examples for a particular scan page might be:
Book page:?/??
Page format: normal ordered single page/ normal ordered double page/ left only; right only
First record number ?*
Last record number ?*
Section: start/ end/ start& end*/ mid-section
Type of section: birth/ marriage/ death/ birth index/ marriage index/ death index/ other *
Year:?*
*2nd input set needed to cover section changes in the scan page
One you have the location of the start and ends are of sections, it is simple to interpolate what is happening in between and to re-unify left and right hand pages in the correct order. However, additional tags will be needed for things like mis-ordered pages and spoilt pages etc.
My proposal is that the existing microfilm navigation is not changed, so it cannot be broken, but these tags are added to be input as a collaboration by users. Other users could update things when they find gaps or mistakes, and add 👍️thumbs up for good, 👎️thumbs down for problem and perhaps horizontal thumb for OK but incomplete.
A second set of navigation for each film could then be added as an alternate view, where the pages are in the correct order, and marked with the tag attributes for easy navigation.
This second navigation set could operate beyond the film itself, and contain links to the preceding and later years that might be on different films, and those links could again be provided by users.
I hope this makes sense.