Don't get me wrong, Scotland's People is a world beater with what it offers, with probably the best customer service in the world for any genealogy supplier - it's just very inflexible with the options it offers for payment!
Chris
Official visit at ScotlandsPeople Centre July 4th
Moderator: Global Moderators
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Chris Paton
- Posts: 433
- Joined: Sun Jan 14, 2007 9:14 pm
Absolutely. Bear in mind, Ancestry used to be subscription based only, but adopted their new system with no great loss of trade, and probably an increase!
Don't get me wrong, Scotland's People is a world beater with what it offers, with probably the best customer service in the world for any genealogy supplier - it's just very inflexible with the options it offers for payment!
Chris
Don't get me wrong, Scotland's People is a world beater with what it offers, with probably the best customer service in the world for any genealogy supplier - it's just very inflexible with the options it offers for payment!
Chris
Tha an lasair nad anam aig meadhan do bhith
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
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marilyn morning
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 3098
- Joined: Sun Dec 12, 2004 1:45 am
- Location: Rhode Island, USA
Chris wrote
This has always been a topic of discussion here on TS. Perhaps SP should consider expanding their horizons on the internet by offering several alternate research options, such as a 24 hour pay per view for a set fee or a yearly subscription? In my opinion it would certainly be worth the time to review the topic?
For our SPUG members of TS, without trolling through the minutes of your meetings, has this topic ever been placed on a SPUG meeting agenda?
Regards
marilyn
Hi Chris,it's just very inflexible with the options it offers for payment!
This has always been a topic of discussion here on TS. Perhaps SP should consider expanding their horizons on the internet by offering several alternate research options, such as a 24 hour pay per view for a set fee or a yearly subscription? In my opinion it would certainly be worth the time to review the topic?
For our SPUG members of TS, without trolling through the minutes of your meetings, has this topic ever been placed on a SPUG meeting agenda?
Regards
marilyn
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Currie
- Posts: 3924
- Joined: Fri Jun 22, 2007 3:20 am
- Location: Australia
Just a few comments:
User Groups:
From the minutes of the last ScotlandsPeople User Group meeting 1 February, 2008.
11. The User Group – frequency of meetings and future structure of the Group.
The User Group members, prior to the meeting, had requested that there should be an agreed future schedule of meetings, perhaps 3 times a year, perhaps less frequently as appropriate to the circumstances.. Paul (Deputy Registrar General, GROS) explained that SP was now a mature website, over 5 years old, and that as there was little more to be added to the site, the requirement for regular meetings has in fact lessened. He also pointed out that there was no need to set a specific date if nothing major had occurred on SP since the previous meeting.
That particular meeting of the “User Group” consisted of 7 representatives of GROS and SOL, 7 individuals whose status as users were undisclosed and 2 other individuals who were unable to properly participate for technical reasons. The chair of the meeting and the secretary position and therefore complete control of the meeting was held by GROS.
The planned composition of the Centre User Group meeting of April 2008 (including those who couldn’t attend) seems to have been.
General Register Office Scotland: 7 representatives.
National archives Scotland: 5
Court of Lord Lyon: 1
Scottish Association Family History Societies: 2
Genealogists (no other detail): 4
Unspecified: 1
Representatives of Users at the April meeting comprised only about one third of the total in attendance and to me the User Group concept all looks a bit too much like window dressing. I think that our friend “Paul” has made it quite clear what the attitude of GROS is, and always has been, to User groups. They don’t appear to be interested in any suggestion of change to their perfect creation.
ScotlandsPeople Centre:
To me, on the other side of the world, it’s a complete irrelevance, as I’m sure it would be to a great many others who are very much closer geographically. As far as I am concerned I would be happy to see the cost of accessing material via the Centre being reflected in the cost and value of the building, maintenance and staffing thereof. That is the real economic cost of everything to do with it per year being equally shared by every person who walks through the door. The internet service, as used by most people, could just as easily be delivered from a tin shed in the middle of nowhere manned by a couple of people and I would like to see that reality reflected in the internet cost.
Even something as trivial as a free search and the enhancement of their search facility, which I am sure would have been raised at one of the User Group meetings, seems to be beyond the comprehension of GROS. Such a thing would remove ScotlandsPeople resemblance to a gambling site, would mean that people would be less likely to be wasting money for no return while ScotlandsPeople unconscionably rakes it in. Is it reasonable for an organisation to ask customers to pay to see the goods it has for sale. Imagine a supermarket situation where everything is in plain unmarked packets and you have to pay to get even the slightest idea if they contain what it is you are interested in.
Alan
User Groups:
From the minutes of the last ScotlandsPeople User Group meeting 1 February, 2008.
11. The User Group – frequency of meetings and future structure of the Group.
The User Group members, prior to the meeting, had requested that there should be an agreed future schedule of meetings, perhaps 3 times a year, perhaps less frequently as appropriate to the circumstances.. Paul (Deputy Registrar General, GROS) explained that SP was now a mature website, over 5 years old, and that as there was little more to be added to the site, the requirement for regular meetings has in fact lessened. He also pointed out that there was no need to set a specific date if nothing major had occurred on SP since the previous meeting.
That particular meeting of the “User Group” consisted of 7 representatives of GROS and SOL, 7 individuals whose status as users were undisclosed and 2 other individuals who were unable to properly participate for technical reasons. The chair of the meeting and the secretary position and therefore complete control of the meeting was held by GROS.
The planned composition of the Centre User Group meeting of April 2008 (including those who couldn’t attend) seems to have been.
General Register Office Scotland: 7 representatives.
National archives Scotland: 5
Court of Lord Lyon: 1
Scottish Association Family History Societies: 2
Genealogists (no other detail): 4
Unspecified: 1
Representatives of Users at the April meeting comprised only about one third of the total in attendance and to me the User Group concept all looks a bit too much like window dressing. I think that our friend “Paul” has made it quite clear what the attitude of GROS is, and always has been, to User groups. They don’t appear to be interested in any suggestion of change to their perfect creation.
ScotlandsPeople Centre:
To me, on the other side of the world, it’s a complete irrelevance, as I’m sure it would be to a great many others who are very much closer geographically. As far as I am concerned I would be happy to see the cost of accessing material via the Centre being reflected in the cost and value of the building, maintenance and staffing thereof. That is the real economic cost of everything to do with it per year being equally shared by every person who walks through the door. The internet service, as used by most people, could just as easily be delivered from a tin shed in the middle of nowhere manned by a couple of people and I would like to see that reality reflected in the internet cost.
Even something as trivial as a free search and the enhancement of their search facility, which I am sure would have been raised at one of the User Group meetings, seems to be beyond the comprehension of GROS. Such a thing would remove ScotlandsPeople resemblance to a gambling site, would mean that people would be less likely to be wasting money for no return while ScotlandsPeople unconscionably rakes it in. Is it reasonable for an organisation to ask customers to pay to see the goods it has for sale. Imagine a supermarket situation where everything is in plain unmarked packets and you have to pay to get even the slightest idea if they contain what it is you are interested in.
Alan
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Chris Paton
- Posts: 433
- Joined: Sun Jan 14, 2007 9:14 pm
Hi Alan,
There are many factors at work here I think which will sadly see the current system maintained. First though, I should say in SP's defence, I think to some degree they do listen - they did change the search criteria recently for their censuses online, so that you can now search for an individual with a second person's name in that household also a field option. So instead of just search for a John Smith, you can narrow it to a John Smith with a Morag present, etc. And to be fair to GROS/SP, their prices are a bargain when compared to the English set up of purchasing certificates at £7 at a time, or the Irish system of transcripts for 5 Euros at a time. My sole problem is with the disparity in costs to the exact same records used by SP and GROS, between the online costs and access through the centre, which I think discriminates against overseas users.
I work as a genealogist for a lving, and I rarely use SP for a few reasons. The first is that it is relatively too expensive - it is usually (but by no means always) cheaper to go to GROS and do the work there; there are considerably more records available than just BDMs and census records there; and the quality of some digitised records remains poor (though I have yet to come across a poorly digitised OPR record!), and I can access the microfiche and microfilm as a back up.
There are plans to extend DIGROS (or whatever its replacement is) to centre's outside GROS, as currently happens at Strathclyde Genealogy centre at Park Circus in Glasgow. There is a new genealogy centre setting up at Kilmarnock that will be hoping for access, the Mitchell is also planning on it etc, and others. Once these centres are up, I suspect that the last thing SP will want to do is to change its online search costs. If I was suddenly able to access the digitised records at home through SP for say a £10 full day subscription, that would theoretically save me having to go to Edinburgh, or even Kilmarnock, and therefore the income to those centres would drop. The point for me though is that I would most likely continue with using Edinburgh anyway, as there are so many additional benefits there, but for many others I am sure these would be attractive centres to go to.
But you are right. We have that option in Scotland to visit the new SP centre, the current GROS etc, but overseas visitors don't. It is ironic that whilst GROS/SP has a monopoly on the records here, we still have the choice at a local level as to whether to use the online site or visit the centre, and the rates are markedly different. Overseas users can only enjoy a monopoly on the monopoly - the credit based system is all you have access to. In terms of transparency on the indexes, I couldn't agree more - look at what you get for your money on the Emerald Ancestors indexes site in Northern Ireland - enough info to confirm that you have the right event, but not quite enough genealogically to do without the full cert, with payment based on a license period of a minimum of one month at £9.99 (on the down side through with EA, the full record will then cost £12 - no-one said this would be easy lol!)
If GROS/SP had competition, this would be amended overnight I think, but they have cleverly held onto their monopoly with access to the BDMs, after being really badly trumped by Ancestry on the census front. Ancestry bought up all their census microfilms, had them transcribed and made available on their site. No copyright was breached as the indexes were Ancestry's own creation, but GROS was so narked at this that they have refused access to the images on the Ancestry site. The saving grace for GROS/SP was that Ancestry botched up the indexes so badly. Which is a pity, as their search field options are far superior to those of the GROS/SP, but they did it on the cheap in China, and the results show! As a result of all that, as I understand it, GROS has stopped sales of all microfilms and now enjoys the perfect monopoly.
Chris
There are many factors at work here I think which will sadly see the current system maintained. First though, I should say in SP's defence, I think to some degree they do listen - they did change the search criteria recently for their censuses online, so that you can now search for an individual with a second person's name in that household also a field option. So instead of just search for a John Smith, you can narrow it to a John Smith with a Morag present, etc. And to be fair to GROS/SP, their prices are a bargain when compared to the English set up of purchasing certificates at £7 at a time, or the Irish system of transcripts for 5 Euros at a time. My sole problem is with the disparity in costs to the exact same records used by SP and GROS, between the online costs and access through the centre, which I think discriminates against overseas users.
I work as a genealogist for a lving, and I rarely use SP for a few reasons. The first is that it is relatively too expensive - it is usually (but by no means always) cheaper to go to GROS and do the work there; there are considerably more records available than just BDMs and census records there; and the quality of some digitised records remains poor (though I have yet to come across a poorly digitised OPR record!), and I can access the microfiche and microfilm as a back up.
There are plans to extend DIGROS (or whatever its replacement is) to centre's outside GROS, as currently happens at Strathclyde Genealogy centre at Park Circus in Glasgow. There is a new genealogy centre setting up at Kilmarnock that will be hoping for access, the Mitchell is also planning on it etc, and others. Once these centres are up, I suspect that the last thing SP will want to do is to change its online search costs. If I was suddenly able to access the digitised records at home through SP for say a £10 full day subscription, that would theoretically save me having to go to Edinburgh, or even Kilmarnock, and therefore the income to those centres would drop. The point for me though is that I would most likely continue with using Edinburgh anyway, as there are so many additional benefits there, but for many others I am sure these would be attractive centres to go to.
But you are right. We have that option in Scotland to visit the new SP centre, the current GROS etc, but overseas visitors don't. It is ironic that whilst GROS/SP has a monopoly on the records here, we still have the choice at a local level as to whether to use the online site or visit the centre, and the rates are markedly different. Overseas users can only enjoy a monopoly on the monopoly - the credit based system is all you have access to. In terms of transparency on the indexes, I couldn't agree more - look at what you get for your money on the Emerald Ancestors indexes site in Northern Ireland - enough info to confirm that you have the right event, but not quite enough genealogically to do without the full cert, with payment based on a license period of a minimum of one month at £9.99 (on the down side through with EA, the full record will then cost £12 - no-one said this would be easy lol!)
If GROS/SP had competition, this would be amended overnight I think, but they have cleverly held onto their monopoly with access to the BDMs, after being really badly trumped by Ancestry on the census front. Ancestry bought up all their census microfilms, had them transcribed and made available on their site. No copyright was breached as the indexes were Ancestry's own creation, but GROS was so narked at this that they have refused access to the images on the Ancestry site. The saving grace for GROS/SP was that Ancestry botched up the indexes so badly. Which is a pity, as their search field options are far superior to those of the GROS/SP, but they did it on the cheap in China, and the results show! As a result of all that, as I understand it, GROS has stopped sales of all microfilms and now enjoys the perfect monopoly.
Chris
Tha an lasair nad anam aig meadhan do bhith
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
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Currie
- Posts: 3924
- Joined: Fri Jun 22, 2007 3:20 am
- Location: Australia
Hello Chris,
Thanks for the response and information.
I think that if Bill Gates was running the SP Business Model he would be in serious legal trouble. I guess it is fortunate that GROS isn’t able to remove the Scottish data from Ancestry, or to shut down FreeCen or take away what there is on the IGI.
Competition encourages lower prices, improved product and greater efficiency. We’ll see how things look in a few years when everyone else has the very latest and SP has the Model T. The poor quality of their certificate images is already an indication of a floppy disc mentality.
I’ve never personally had a problem with Ancestry’s English census transcriptions. I would just keep searching and downloading images till I found them. How many times have people said that they have found people on Ancestry, despite the poor transcriptions, or on FreeCen or somewhere else that cost them nothing when they couldn’t find them on a paid search on SP.
And I think the cheapness of Scottish certificates is a bit of an illusion really, at least for many people. If they looked at their tally of good certificates and considered their total outlay they could find the cost very much higher than the theoretical 6 credits.
Oh well, I’ll wait and see.
And all the best,
Alan
Thanks for the response and information.
I think that if Bill Gates was running the SP Business Model he would be in serious legal trouble. I guess it is fortunate that GROS isn’t able to remove the Scottish data from Ancestry, or to shut down FreeCen or take away what there is on the IGI.
Competition encourages lower prices, improved product and greater efficiency. We’ll see how things look in a few years when everyone else has the very latest and SP has the Model T. The poor quality of their certificate images is already an indication of a floppy disc mentality.
I’ve never personally had a problem with Ancestry’s English census transcriptions. I would just keep searching and downloading images till I found them. How many times have people said that they have found people on Ancestry, despite the poor transcriptions, or on FreeCen or somewhere else that cost them nothing when they couldn’t find them on a paid search on SP.
And I think the cheapness of Scottish certificates is a bit of an illusion really, at least for many people. If they looked at their tally of good certificates and considered their total outlay they could find the cost very much higher than the theoretical 6 credits.
Oh well, I’ll wait and see.
And all the best,
Alan
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Chris Paton
- Posts: 433
- Joined: Sun Jan 14, 2007 9:14 pm
Hi Alan,
A few thoughts on that, partially in agreement, and partially playing Devil's advocate! (Satan Paton my wife calls me..!)
On Ancestry, I did a dissertation last year during my postgrad certificate at Strathclyde University on the handloom weaving industry in Perth between 1770 and 1844, and decided to try and use Ancestry to check the 1841 census for all weavers in Perth. The advantage was that their occupation field allowed me to do a search solely on terms such as 'HLW', 'weaver' or 'linen weaver', which SP/DIGROS does not offer. The disadvantage was that information within 19.5% of the 300 or so households I found had transcription errors, including, I discovered, some transcription errors for the occupation fields themselves - eg. my four greats grandfather was identified in modern Chinese English as a "soman weaver", which was actually a "linen weaver"! I had to abandon all of this from my study after a couple of weeks work as it was just so completely unreliable.
On the IGI, I have often found entries in the OPRs that were missed by the LDS transcribers. DIGROS has also occasionally missed items from their index, but they will at least update the index if it is pointed out to them.
But on the competition front, I could not agree more. I think it happened in England, purely because of the disaster that was the 1901 census for TNA, when the database crashed within minutes of its launch. After that they licensed out further census digitiations and indexing to Ancestry, probably to save themselves an eternal headache. By licensing it they still get some money back. In Scotland, with the census pool so much smaller, I suspect that GROS decided it would be in their interest to hold the monopoly on the images as the projects could be more manageable.
In terms of future developments, I suspect that FreeCEN is actually the one to keep an eye on. I recently did some work for somebody whereby I was able to find an individual indexed on FreeCEN who was missed by both Ancestry and DIGROS/SP. As coverage just now is only decent for 1841 and 1851, it will be some time before it becomes a real threat to GROS, but it will get there eventually, and as their standards are so high, I think they will become quite a threat financially to GROS/SP. But at the rate of progress just now, that could still be years away.
Chris
A few thoughts on that, partially in agreement, and partially playing Devil's advocate!
(Satan Paton my wife calls me..!)On Ancestry, I did a dissertation last year during my postgrad certificate at Strathclyde University on the handloom weaving industry in Perth between 1770 and 1844, and decided to try and use Ancestry to check the 1841 census for all weavers in Perth. The advantage was that their occupation field allowed me to do a search solely on terms such as 'HLW', 'weaver' or 'linen weaver', which SP/DIGROS does not offer. The disadvantage was that information within 19.5% of the 300 or so households I found had transcription errors, including, I discovered, some transcription errors for the occupation fields themselves - eg. my four greats grandfather was identified in modern Chinese English as a "soman weaver", which was actually a "linen weaver"!
I had to abandon all of this from my study after a couple of weeks work as it was just so completely unreliable. On the IGI, I have often found entries in the OPRs that were missed by the LDS transcribers. DIGROS has also occasionally missed items from their index, but they will at least update the index if it is pointed out to them.
But on the competition front, I could not agree more. I think it happened in England, purely because of the disaster that was the 1901 census for TNA, when the database crashed within minutes of its launch. After that they licensed out further census digitiations and indexing to Ancestry, probably to save themselves an eternal headache. By licensing it they still get some money back. In Scotland, with the census pool so much smaller, I suspect that GROS decided it would be in their interest to hold the monopoly on the images as the projects could be more manageable.
In terms of future developments, I suspect that FreeCEN is actually the one to keep an eye on. I recently did some work for somebody whereby I was able to find an individual indexed on FreeCEN who was missed by both Ancestry and DIGROS/SP. As coverage just now is only decent for 1841 and 1851, it will be some time before it becomes a real threat to GROS, but it will get there eventually, and as their standards are so high, I think they will become quite a threat financially to GROS/SP. But at the rate of progress just now, that could still be years away.
Chris
Tha an lasair nad anam aig meadhan do bhith
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
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Montrose Budie
- Posts: 713
- Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2004 11:37 pm
Without in any way wishing to be in the least cynical, I think that it will be found that the 4th July date date relates only to the completion of the purely construction part of the new centre project.TAFKAM wrote:Work is frantically continuing apace at SP HQ - all the bothies are now gone from the courtyard - all going to look nice and spick and span for Her Majesty's visit on 4th July!
In other words, it may take some yet longer period of time before the new centre as originally described in the press release back in mid-2005 is actually up and running !
For example, as I understand the situation from various sources, work has only very recently fully commenced on the integrated software required for the new centre, i.e. inter alia, the long promised equivalent to the search engine that has been available online at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk for several years, including not least wildcards and searches over ranges of years; and then there's also the question of integrating the NAS and Lord Lyon data with the new combined database and search engine.
Given government departments' and government agencies' records over the past couple of decades in relation to such software development, I'll be very pleasantly surprised in this case if the required software is up and running, fully debugged, anything before some date in 2009 .............
That also in the context of a long, sad history on the part of GROS' many promises with regard to the dates for the availability of information on their www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk website, never mind many, many failures to meet long promised dates for search engine upgrades .....
mb
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TAFKAM
- Posts: 23
- Joined: Thu Jun 19, 2008 8:37 pm
- Location: Scotland
Unfortunately, the only place where this visit is called an opening is on the Royal website - and it couldn't be further from the truth, as you rightly say. I can assure you that the vast majority of staff in GROS see this is a visit, and not an opening. How the public will feel about it when they demand to use the new service on the following Monday, having been lead to believe that the place is open - that remains to be seen.Montrose Budie wrote:Without in any way wishing to be in the least cynical, I think that it will be found that the 4th July date date relates only to the completion of the purely construction part of the new centre project.TAFKAM wrote:Work is frantically continuing apace at SP HQ - all the bothies are now gone from the courtyard - all going to look nice and spick and span for Her Majesty's visit on 4th July!
mb
I can only reiterate what I said earlier on in this thread. That is to say, that the new Scotlandspeople Centre will open on August 25th.
On my way, from misery to happiness.
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Chris Paton
- Posts: 433
- Joined: Sun Jan 14, 2007 9:14 pm
I don't doubt for a minute that it has been billed as that on the royal diary because it was actually meant to be the official opening. This will have been planned for many months in advance, in anticipation of the centre's opening date in spring, as was the most recent revised plan. The Royal hit squad obviously had more faith in SP/GROS hitting deadlines than those actually using the service have always had!
I doubt her maj will be too despondent though - being the queen, she can probably trace her lineage back to God, and maybe even his parents, so I doubt she'll be too worried! lol
Chris
I doubt her maj will be too despondent though - being the queen, she can probably trace her lineage back to God, and maybe even his parents, so I doubt she'll be too worried! lol
Chris
Tha an lasair nad anam aig meadhan do bhith
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
Nas làidir 's nas motha na riaghaltas no rìgh.
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TAFKAM
- Posts: 23
- Joined: Thu Jun 19, 2008 8:37 pm
- Location: Scotland
Absolutely correct Chris, this has been in the offing for many months. It has echoes of the NRH price decrease as well - a prospective date for the drop to 10GBP had to be given way in advance, seeing as how the prices are set in statute and those take FOREVER to alter.
You're not suggesting for one minute that Her Maj is related to.................................
Matthew Pinsent?
You're not suggesting for one minute that Her Maj is related to.................................
Matthew Pinsent?
On my way, from misery to happiness.