Terrible digitisation

LegacyUser

Ed Brumby said: What a complete utter waste of time digitising 1906129. 8092032.
You can't read them on the screen and you have fallen for the same tarp of digitising probably from the MF which has documents laid one on top of each other. I bought the MF from Mass Archives years ago and it is the same. I visited the archives and left in disgust when I saw the images. Those are really important for military and genealogical research. Ed Brumby

LegacyUser

Paul said: Ed

I, as a fellow FamilySearch user, scrolled through the images to image 64. There do appear to be several images (in that part of the film alone) that have not been copied. Obviously, if your person of interest's record was on one of these pages, I can understand how disappointed you must be.

However, the pages that have been "unfolded" and copied show a clear image and have possibly been of great interest to other users.

As you acknowledge, this appears to be a copy of the same microfilm you have viewed elsewhere. I imagine the problem relates to the fact that FamilySearch have not gained permission to gain access to the originals, whereby the pages could have been carefully photographed without any pages being missed.

As I say, I can understand your disappointment, but given the circumstances, all we can do is hope these documents will be subject to a further filming at some future date and find their way to the FamilySearch pages.

LegacyUser

Juli said: How is digitizing microfilm a "trap"? That's the whole purpose, most of the time. The materials costs for reproducing microfilms became unsupportable, so FS stopped film distribution, pushing to digitize all of the films instead. They're making pretty good headway on the project. In the meantime, there are other collections that have gone directly to digital, but these are generally new material, meaning things that FS does not already have on microfilm -- and rightfully so, because in most cases it makes no sense to redo all of that work.

(They'd have to renegotiate a contract with the record custodians, assemble the equipment, ship it to the relevant location, send out a crew to that location, negotiate schedules and building access for the crew, find them a place to set up and work, and give them access to the records. It would mean that the records would be newly subject to accidental damage, and there would be all sorts of new opportunities for errors and omissions, both in the imaging and in the cataloging. Even Before Virus, all of this was Not Happening Anytime Soon.)

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: The catalogue record for microfilm 1906129/DGS 8092183 and microfilm 1906128/
DGS 8092032 (assuming this is what is referred to above as 1906129. 8092032)
"Muster/payrolls, and various papers (1763-1808) of the Revolutionary War [Massachusetts and Rhode Island]" indicates that these records were "Filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1993"

https://www.familysearch.org/search/c...

The Genealogical Society of Utah is an earlier name for FamilySearch, so these records were filmed by FamilySearch from the original Archive. The complaint by
Ed Brumby seems therefore to relate to the filming 27 years ago, rather than to the change from microfilm to digitised microfilm. Perhaps it is a bit late to be complaining about a microfilm from 1993?

LegacyUser

ATP said: MaureenE,

I agree that it is quite possible that the issue is with the microfilm. And, the film doesn't even have to be from the familysearch archives, since some years ago, I ordered a film from the Virginia State Library to be sent to my local public library, and the part I needed in the film was so dim as not be able to figure anything out. Whether it was in the original record itself since it was 400 years old and the ink was badly faded or whether in the actual filming process, I can't even guess. Fortunately, the original record was transcribed more than 100 years ago so there is a secondary record, but, I wanted to check the original document for verification.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Ed writes that he "bought the [microfilm] from [the] Mass[achussetts] Archives years ago", so he must know that the ship has long sailed on the quality of those images, but he apparently imagines that digitizing the originals would somehow be exactly the same amount of effort as digitizing the microfilm, and he was therefore expecting the digitized images to be different from (that is, better than) the microfilm. Or at any rate, positing such a misconception is the only way I can make any sense of his complaint about an "utter waste of time".