An interesting Twitter exchange occurred this week.
Family historian Dave Annal (@Dave_Lifelines) asked FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk) if there was any news following a statement from the company in June that it would look into the lack of quality in the downloaded images from its newspaper collections, which are sourced from the British Newspaper Archive project (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), but hosted also on the FindmyPast platform. In short, whilst perfectly legible when viewed on the two websites, when downloading the images the compressed images available are so horrendous that many of the pages become utterly illegible. The workaround for most of us has been to simply screengrab what we need, which preserves the resolution of what is seen initially.
This was FindmyPast's response:
I jumped in with a follow up, and asked if this would also mean a similar quality update on the British Newspaper Archive?
As FindmyPast states, it is expected that this will be sorted within the next month.
Here's hoping that the quality of what we can soon download will match what we can see online!
(With thanks to Dave Annal and Findmypast)
Chris
My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.
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