Our image CDs contain a name index created by Yesterday's Names, listing all of the names referred to in the locally-produced pages of the magazines, plus scanned images of those pages.| | |  | Index by name – this gives an overview of the various indexed events associated with a person, and makes it easier to look for name variants. The index identifies which issue of the magazine and which page that a name appears in. | | | |
 | Scanned page images – contains images (pdf format) of the locally-produced pages of the magazines. These are usually in greyscale format, for more clarity, but in a few cases they are scanned in colour if this produces a clearer image. Because the quality of the pages and printing in old parish magazines is very variable, please note that there is inevitably some variation in image quality on different pages. |
Why do some Yesterday's Names CDs contain scanned images, but others don't? The decision about whether to scan or just index really depends on the quality of the magazines for the parish. These documents are over a hundred years old, and were often printed on coloured paper. The quality of the paper is also very variable, often now very fragile, and in some cases the magazines have been bound so tightly, it would be impossible to scan them without removing them from their binding. The worst thing though is trying to get a decent quality scan, with faded print on coloured paper (the colour often differing on each page!). So - if the pages are of a fairly uniform background colour, the print is reasonably distinct, and the paper will stand up to it - then we scan the pages and accompany them with a simple name index. But if the pages aren't easily scannable, then we produce a detailed name index, extracting as much of the information about each name reference as possible, and adding in transcriptions of a selection of articles. |
