[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] working with images at Polish State Archives

[Albert Muth]

It is amazing how quickly news travels nowadays.  New records to look at?
I am SO there.

I guess we should not be surprised that Konin records were posted a bit
earlier; after all, it's one of the archives that has been loading images
for months now anyway in the Beta project.  Since instructions on using the
site are seriously lacking there, I wish to add a few more to the ones that
were part of my article that was reprinted in the December 2012 SGGEE
journal.

Today's hint has to do with image quality.

Finding images to look at is half the battle, and to learn how to do that,
I refer you back to my article.  Once you find them and cane see them,
however, what can you do with them?

Images are found, 10 to a page (screen).  Images 1-10 are on page 1. Images
11-20 are on screen 2.  Images 21-30 are on screen 3.

So, you know that if you want image 54, it will be found on which
screen/page?  (Answer is found later in this email).

There is no relation between record number (registry number) and image
number.  We must all think carefully about about our citation practices.
What we used when we were
tracking records on microfilms is not good enough to find the image.  And
an image may have just one record (in the case of a marriage record--as it
happens from Konin, in the year 1881), four records for births, 6 for
deaths or who knows what other combinations are possible.

In case you were wondering, Image 54 would be found on screen 6 (containing
images 51-60).

Okay, so you have found an image that you want to save forever and ever.
Be careful what you do!

When you see 10 images on the screen, and get greedy, and say, I will copy
them all one by one.  Egad.  You will get images the size of a postage
stamp, sized about 4 KB.
As you enlarge them in a viewer, the record is quite unreadable. Throw
these images in the trash, they are not worth saving.

Back to the webpage with 10 images on it. You may click on the center of
each image, one by one, and get something larger, that will print out.
Size is 104 KB. Better, but the writing appears as if written by a crayon.

The best solution is.  find the image you want on the page you want. click
on it to enlarge it.  Notice on the enlarged image the X in the upper
right?  It does what an X normally does (close the image).  On the bottom
right, there is a Z, that does something (it enlarges the image, but I
still cannot make it work with the entire image).

Then, still on the bottom right, notice a little bit to the left of that Z,
there is another icon.  This icon, if you click on it, will open another
window that will allow you to download a better image.  But the screen
itself will look confusing, and again, there are no instructions on what to
do.

You will see the record group from the State Archive that you are in.  This
needs to be part of your citation. At the moment, I am working with
marriages from the period 1881-1889.  I am try to save record #7 for 1881.
It is on image 10. this is what I will see in the middle of the screen:

     54/855/0/-/30: Księga małżeństw
     (obraz: 10.jpg)
     download

That last word "download" is what does the magic of downloading.  Who
knew?  The resultant image will be about 677KB, much sharper and quite
readable, that is, assuming you can read Russian in Cyrillic script.  That
is a separate issue.

I do not believe that there is any magic attached to the filename assigned
to each record.  Marriage #10 for 1881 happens to be named
qM7eXetx3fCZ0hnAzNodVw.  When I saved the letter, I needed to add the
suffix .jpg to it to make it readable.  If you forget to add the jpg suffix
when you download it, you may still rename the file.  Just add on .jpg at
the end, and the file becomes instantly readable.

The archive names the file containing Marriage #11 b3gEScGGb_KFG1a7oXA2SQ.
I am afraid I do not quite follow their naming system to understand how one
alphanumeric sequence is succeeded by the other. (qM7... is followed by
b3gE.... HOW?).  For the moment, I have just named the files 1881 10 and
1881 11.  The files are for my personal use, after all.

You must keep track of the URL for images 1-10  and images 2-20. Images
1-10 are on http://szukajwarchiwach.pl/54/855/0/-/30/str/1/1#skanp

Images 2-20 are on http://szukajwarchiwach.pl/54/855/0/-/30/str/1/2#skan

images 3-30 are on http://szukajwarchiwach.pl/54/855/0/-/30/str/1/3#skan

These quite specific URL's may not be necessary, if you can grasp that
image #54 is on screen 6.

It is important to use the URL for the collection of 1881-1889 marriages,
namely http://szukajwarchiwach.pl/54/855/0/-/30 or perhaps just
54/855/0/-/30, depending on how you configure your citation
(bibliographical entry).

Happy Hunting.

Al Muth
Michigan