Well where are we? I have two projects on the go at the moment the Liverpool Bay and bringing the website of the Liverpool Scottish TA regiment up to date. An informal meeting just before Christmas at the Research Society discussed what happens next year. So read on …

Liverpool Scottish:

Firstly the Liverpool Scottish Site: As you can see the site is very old looking. To be fair it has been created by the Hon. Sec with no professional support over a number of years but he does love his colours! It was also written using Frontpage. Getting rid of the frames and introducing CSS has pushed the site beyond Frontpages capabilities. Yes I know you can do almost anything in Frontpage but to go beyond the basics you need to understand html php and javascripts etc. and there are easier ways to do those than using Frontpage. Ultimately the plan is to have a virtual museum but phase one is to update the existing site. At the moment I’m reworking the seventy odd pages to modern standards. I expect to complete by mid January and will report my experiences once completed.

The Wrecks of Liverpool Bay:

The scanning has completed and I’ve OCRed the first batch of records. I found it a bit of a chore as my OCR software was just the bundled one with the cannon scanner. As the wreck cards are written using professional jargon and shorthand, ‘INS’ for insert for example the poor software was reduced to guessing. I have therefore splashed out and purchased (with real money!) ABBY’s OCR software Finereader. This is more accurate and once I’ve read the manual and played around a bit it started to learn so each card becomes more accurate. As the society is not meeting again until the end of January I am holding fire on this while I complete Task One above.

The future plans about the information are coming together as various members of the society want to use the cards as source data for further research with a view to producing a definitive ‘wrecks of Liverpool Bay’, hopefully on-line.

A second research project has also started based on a collection of 350 black and white negatives which have been donated to the society. This has started me looking at how to scan and store negatives and transparencies. So once the Liverpool Bay project is completed, as far as the IT bit anyway, I’ll be looking at that.

All the best to you all in the New Year and be sure the Mayans don’t get you!!