British Data Archive, now the largest publisher of census material on CD, recognised early on that not many of us were lucky enough to have the census material we needed for our research available locally, greatly hampering our efforts. Buying a reader and microfilm from The National Archives (TNA) is too costly for most people, especially when they already own a computer, so publishing on CD was an obvious move.
British Data Archive embarked on a major project to digitise all the English and Welsh census returns and make them widely available to researchers around the world providing availability, for a one-off cost equivalent to a couple of research trips. |
Digitising the images onto CD to sell at an affordable price was a large undertaking for a small company. It not only required the purchase of microfilm (TNA doesn’t loan film, you have to buy it) and specialist equipment, but also additional staff. British Data Archive committed themselves to completing the entire project- all areas and years- but initially it was decided to omit the 1881 Census, which had long been available in transcript form. The images for the London 1881 Census have now been digitised and the CD will be available shortly.
Coverage
Money raised from each CD release has been reinvested in the business to buy more film records and pay the extra staff needed to complete |
the digitisation of all years in a sensible timescale. With the 1861, 1871 and 1891 Censuses already completed, all counties now have a minimum of three census years available. In fact half the country has four years completed and all the years are available for the largest areas ( London, Lancashire and Yorkshire), plus seven other counties. Presently about 70 percent of 1851 and 1841 have been completed, and only the smaller counties need to be done. They should appear fairly rapidly, completing the digitising project.
Image quality
Much care is taken to ensure the highest image quality possible. First the original TNA films are scanned, then processed to optimise the image quality, |
by de-skewing, despeckling, resizing and generally cleaning up the images. The images are then converted into portable document format (PDF) files, usually containing one census piece per PDF file. These are bookmarked and TNA place name and street indexes are added. Every image is then checked for readability and a report made of any poor ones. These are individually re-scanned to obtain the best results, which often requires scanning in greyscale (rather than black-and-white) to capture the maximum amount of detail. If the images are still poor, new copies of the pages are ordered from TNA and re-scanned. The bad images are then replaced in the PDF files, which are then ready for burning onto CD.
The filmed image quality of the later census years generally doesn’t present problems, but the 1841 Census books |