Local Government - Cemeteries Department
Case Study One
DIGITISATION OF CEMETERY REGISTERS & PLOT MAPS
ADMINISTRATION OF RECORDS & DISPLAYING RECORDS ONLINE
OVERVIEW
The Cemeteries Department at this Town Council has won awards, picking up
an award at the 2006 Cemetery of the Year Awards. This forward thinking
council had a long term ambition to place their cemetery records online.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Each and every burial and/or cremation has been hand written into cemetery
registers since the 1800’s. Each plot has also been marked on cemetery maps.
As with a number of UK Councils, the cemetery registers and maps belong to
this authority were vulnerable. With just a single copy of the documents it was
felt that should the worst happen - fire, flood, burglary etc. - then these precious
records could be lost forever. Having no cemetery records to refer to would
mean that the Cemeteries Department would struggle to function and offer a
public service.
Genealogy is a hobby that has grown significantly over recent years and this has
resulted in the council receiving more and more requests from the public
researching their family history. Finding and supplying this information can
sometimes be a lengthy and arduous process for staff.
AIMS OF THE PROJECT
TownsWeb Archiving met with the council to discuss how we could help them
archive and secure their records and how to make them more accessible to staff
and also the public. After discussing the councils aims it was decided that we
would carry out the following tasks:
- Digitise every page in their cemetery registers; Digitise their plot maps;
- Capture records from the registers and link the records to the digitised pages
- Provide software to allow staff to find digitised pages by searching on: cemetery, section, deceased forename, deceased surname, date of burial
- Provide software to allow staff to maintain their cemetery records
- Provide an online search engine to allow the public to perform searches via the council’s website
THE ITEMS TO BE DIGITISED
This unique collection of bound registers and plot maps have been maintained
by council registrars for more than 150 years. Subsequently some of the
hand-written text has faded and some of the documents are aged and worn.
DIGITISATION & DATA CAPTURE
TownsWeb Archiving took equipment to the council’s offices and performed the
digitisation of the registers onsite. Due to the size of the cemetery maps, some
of these were digitised offsite. All of the images were processed to greyscale at
300dpi to tiff and jpeg formats and supplied on a single external hard-drive.
Having images of the register pages meant that TownsWeb Archiving could
begin capturing the records within them. Accuracy of the records is paramount
and we performed three levels of checking to ensure an accuracy rate of at least
95%.
ADMINISTRATION SOFTWARE
Software in order to maintain the cemetery records. This secure online system
can be accessed by staff at any location where they can gain access to the
Internet. All records link directly to page images from the grave, burial and
owner registers.
PUBLIC - GENEALOGY SEARCHES ONLINE
TownsWeb Archiving provided the council with a search engine that allowed the
public to access a ‘pre-specified’ set of fields and records from their cemetery
database. This search engine has been implemented into the council website.
END OF PROJECT - TIMESCALES & SUPPORT
This project, which involved digitisation, data capture, loading the data into the
Chronicle System and into the public search engine, took just 2 months to
complete. TownsWeb Archiving Ltd continue to support the Council’s staff.
TownsWeb Archiving Ltd can be contacted on
01536 713834 or on the web at
www.townswebarchiving.com or via email at
enquiries@townswebarchiving.com.
