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King Midas in Reverse


RichardB

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So there I am "plinkitty-plonking" away on the keyboard dreaming of finding something interesting, or may even details

of my Great Grandfathers passing.

When, suddenly, nothing much happened, I'd found a site offering a bit of Sheffield related stuff, it offered me a

chance to download a data file (I didn't take a great deal of notice and didn't expect much from an "Arts and Humanities Data Service" site).

Time passes .... quite a bit of it

The 1.65 Gb zip file has landed. I probably thought it said Mb. Oh well, may as well have a go at unzipping it ...

how many files ?? 38,500 files, are they making this up ?, oh well, go for it.

Now, how would you feel, if, free of charge, 38,500 tiff-format images landed on your computer, the bits of interest to us are as follows :

Gales & Martin Directory of Sheffield 1787 as per Neddys posting

Baines History, Directory & Gazetteer of Yorkshire Vol 1: West Riding 1822

W. D. Varey General & Commercial Directory of Sheffield 1825

White's History & Directory of Sheffield, Rotherham 1833

White's General Directory of Sheffield 1849

White's Gazetteer & General Directory of Sheffield 1852

White's General Directory of Sheffield, Rotherham 1856

Creswick Corbitt Directory & Topography of Sheffield 1862

White's Directory of Sheffield, Rotherham 1879

Kelly's Directory of West Riding of Yorkshire Part 2: Places L-Y 1881

Turns out, this is Study 32. Yorkshire 1787 - 1885, it's the data store for www.historicaldirectories.org !!! Available, online, for free for anyone daft enough to download, on a whim, 1.65Gb of "stuff", some Sheffield related, other stuff for Leeds, Bradford, Hull, North Riding etc etc, you just have to download it all, or nothing.

Now, along with the tiff-pictures, are a bunch of OCR text files, for example, the 1822 Baines comes with 806 text files, each one representing a page from the original directory.

If anyone is up for it, we need to edit the files for obvious mistakes and cut and paste the thing back into one document. I'm not expecting anyone to do 800+ pages, but, if a number of people are interested we can get these Directories put back together.

Please PM me your email address, if we get enough people interested, we'll make a start. There is no money changing hands here (though a couple of million would be nice) and all you will receive is a bunch of plain .txt files to virus-check, edit and glue back together to form one document.

Should anyone be interested in downloading the whole thing, images and all, the web-site is

http://www.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/download.h...1&type=coll

though I did have to register (free), I just put "Private Research - Sheffield History" as my reason for joining.

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King Midas in Reverse was a dodgy, psychadelic-era single by the Hollies ..... honest, check it out :rolleyes:

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Wel, I have 1 person signed up and 25 pages into it, how about it Folks ? PM Tsavo, ask how difficult it is (not very).

PM me to ask about how I looked when I realised the line I stuck out into the internet, expecting a cod, thinking I'd landed a sardine, turned out to be a whale ...

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Wel, I have 1 person signed up and 25 pages into it, how about it Folks ? PM Tsavo, ask how difficult it is (not very).

PM me to ask about how I looked when I realised the line I stuck out into the internet, expecting a cod, thinking I'd landed a sardine, turned out to be a whale ...

You're right Richard, it's not difficult. More a matter of tidying up after the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programme has read an "S" as a "A" to give

"High at" instead of high st. In fact it's more or less painless! :wacko::wacko::wacko: Honest!

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Working on making this much easier to volunteer for .... hopefully, recieve PM with some text, edit it a bit, PM it back .... then come Christmas, we all get 19,400 pages of Sheffield info, names, addresses, occupations etc etc

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