Parish Register Transcripts in progress

We therefore wish to promote a scheme to record work in progress and to make this information easily available. This will hopefully avoid such conflicts and provide a mechanism to enable contact to be made between groups and individuals when tahn one has an interest in specific church registers. The LPRS has no plans to transcribe anything but Anglican registers, but want to provide this record of work in progress for all denominations of Lancashire church and burial registers.

Method to be employed

1. Search the church database to find the relevant church and use the contact link at the bottom of the church page to provide the details. This helps ensure that the entry for the correct church will be updated.

   The church database is in itself 'work in progress' so some basic details may be required before a unique page can be generated on which to enter details of the work in progress. Basic details of most of the main churches is in place, but for a few the exact location is required as part of the basic details.

2. The details of the transcript which should be provided via the link will hopefully contain the following items. The more information the better it will be but some information will not be appropriate in all cases.
   • Is it a transcript, index or something else?
   • Which events does it cover and for what range of years?
   • Who is carrying out the work? This can be an individual or a group. In order to provide a contact link a link to an existing web page can be used and we also have script which uses a web form for users to enter queries which then use a database lookup to obtain the email address of the contact. This avoids having email addresses which are open to spam on the web pages themselves, and it provides a single point to change when email addresses change.
   • On whose behalf is the work being carried out? This is typically the group who will be publishing it, and here a link should be provided to the group's own web pages.
   • What is the current status of the transcript? This is something that should be updated as work progresses and helps fend off queries from the curious. The date against the status also gives an indication about the speed of progress.
   • Some transcribers offer to provide a lookup service and so a note about this should be provided. There will be three options:
     • No comment
     • A note indicating that lookups will be performed, and any qualifications on the type of query permitted.
     • If researchers see that lookups are being offered by other transcribers they may ask any you. So if you don't want lookup queries an appropriate note can be added.
3. As you have an interest in the church why not consider providing some facts to add to the church web page, such as a note about its history, and make sure there is record of the location of all existing registers, transcripts, indexes etc. Denton, St. Lawrence is a good example of what can be provided.
4. When the transcript has been completed use the link on the church page to get the status updated and at this point it will remain under the 'Work in progress' heading until it has been published and made available to researchers.
5. Once published again get in contact and details will be added under the 'Transcripts' or 'Indexes' heading so that future researchers will be able to obtain a copy of your work.

How will it look?

This system has been designed to minimise the amount of work required to keep it up to date, and also to help eliminate some of the queries that might arise from researchers, particularly the naive. There is therefore a standard header and trailer round each entry which is stored at a single point thus making it easy to make global additions of text if the need arises. The header at the moment just contains the title, whilst the trailer contains the comments which appear in italics.

Completed transcripts/indexes