Items in Search Images Displayed or Listed out of order?

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I've just used Search Images seeking images for Haslington, Cheshire, England. The result on https://www.familysearch.org/records/... looks like this:

I don't have a problem with this. I wanted to choose the 932 images of Church Records so selected DGS 004008701 and got this on https://www.familysearch.org/records/...

Certain things are fine - the heading in the grey bar says Haslington, there are 932 images to go through, the selector on the right says Item / Entry 1 Haslington.

However, if you select image 3, the good ol' microfilm header, it looks like this:


I hope you guys can read that because it says "Harthill" and if you look at the right, Harthill is Item / Entry 2.

Everything looks like it's selected Haslington as I wanted but the actual images displayed are the alleged 2nd item on that film - namely, Harthill.

I am seriously adrift on this because if I go to image 924 of 932 (and remember it's told me that there are 932 images for Haslington) then that image is for Heswall, Item or Entry 3.

Right now I don't know whether I'm looking at a cataloguing anomaly or a coding failure to cope with more than one item on a film, or a mix.

I suspect that 932 images is way wrong because it refers to the whole film, even though that first screen shot clearly states that Haslington (only Haslington) has 932 images.

Incidentally, if you revert to the good ol' Catalog, there are 932 images on the whole of film 004008701 and it makes it clear that there are 3 items and the first is Harthill whereas the new display puts Haslington first.

This is not good. And I can find no way of navigating to the correct item.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: And to add insult to injury, the good ol' Catalogue makes it clear that the Haslington data on 004008701 are the Bishops' Transcripts, not the Parish Registers, whereas the new display simply refers to Church Records - accurate but useless - which sort of Church records?

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Multiple items on one film. Every image of the film is included, regardless of whether it is to do with the place in question or not.

Unfortunately it appears that they have gone off half-cocked with a new feature (again). It is a necessary pre-requisite of this feature for it to be really useful that all films be split up into their constituent parts. That is a lot of leg work and re-cataloguing.

Have they done that leg work? No. Therefore the feature is only very marginally useful. It's reduced finding some images by a couple of clicks compared to going through the catalogue search. Unfortunately it also suffers from the multiplicity of places of exactly the same name found in the places database (since it appeara to be linked into that database). It's sometimes very unclear why one set of images is associated with the place type of village and the other is associated with the place type of parish for example.

Again the weaknesses in their digital asset management are hamstringing a new feature. Rather sad and unfortunate.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Ayup: without a serious upgrade of the cataloging, the new feature is less than useful.

Sometimes, it pulls up everything that's digitized and in the catalog for a particular place: https://www.familysearch.org/records/...
This is somewhat useful in that it puts in one place films that are otherwise only accessible from three separate catalog pages, but this is counteracted by the useless labeling of many items: "Civil Registration Record", "Church Record".

Sometimes, different catalog items have been associated with different time periods or jurisdictions for a place in the places database, so Image Search only pulls up one catalog entry depending on which jurisdiction you choose from the drop-down:
https://www.familysearch.org/records/...
https://www.familysearch.org/records/...
In this case, the catalog is vastly preferable to the highly-generic labels offered by Search Images.

And sometimes, the unintelligence of the catalog search carries over to Search Images: the catalog does not recognize Balassagyarmat as Exactly The Same Thing as Balassa-Gyarmat, so if I search for the former, I get No Results in the catalog -- and No Results Found in Search Images:
https://www.familysearch.org/records/...
And again, the five separate pages in the catalog (https://www.familysearch.org/search/c...) are much more useful than the generic labels on the combined search:
https://www.familysearch.org/records/...

And in fact, I notice that items that are divided (and separately labeled) by film item in the catalog are presented as a single line in Search Images, rendering the latter even less useful. For example, the following lines from the catalog

Születtek (márc.) 1905-1908 Family History Library International B1 High Density 2268501 Items 1 - 2 4838204
Házasultak 1895-1901 (aug.) Family History Library International B1 High Density 2268501 Items 3 - 4 4838204

get combined into the single line

Balassa-Gyarmat, Nógrád, Hungary 1895–1975 Civil Registration Record 786 images

The only part that's not in the catalog is the image count, but can be easily retrieved by simply clicking on the camera icon to view the film.