The Scotland's People website has rebranded this month, with a new Celtic-inspired logo and a much "chunkier" page design, liberally splashed with "look at me!" orange bars.
The vapid accompanying press release promises easier searching, more streamlined certificate ordering, quicker, faster, blah, blah, blah... are you spotting a theme?! It's all a bit breathless and gushing in my opinion. Since when was family history a sprint? We all know it's a marathon - go too fast, without taking time to reflect on what you've found risks drawing the wrong conclusions. Have users really been clamouring for speed? With no user forum where we might put forward ideas and suggestions or any communication from the National Records of Scotland on what the strategy and priorities are for developing the site, we will never know, I suppose.
As Chris Paton has already commented, it all feels a bit like a corporate re-branding exercise, with no new functionality or improved indexes. Also, as far as I've been able to determine with a very brief look through the search screens, all the same problems with place data are still there as documented on my Searching Scottish parishes on Scotland's People page.
Which rather begs the question, why did the NRS feel the need to do this rebrand? The previous interface did the same job and now there's much more tedious scrolling to construct searches. If there was money to spend, I would have put my vote to incorporating a way of using the feast of meta-data that the NRS have to actually help us construct valid searches.
What do I mean by this? The NRS know whether they have any data at all for specific searches. So instead of that really annoying instruction to keep refining your search when you return no results, tell us that there are NO records of that type for that parish.
The vapid accompanying press release promises easier searching, more streamlined certificate ordering, quicker, faster, blah, blah, blah... are you spotting a theme?! It's all a bit breathless and gushing in my opinion. Since when was family history a sprint? We all know it's a marathon - go too fast, without taking time to reflect on what you've found risks drawing the wrong conclusions. Have users really been clamouring for speed? With no user forum where we might put forward ideas and suggestions or any communication from the National Records of Scotland on what the strategy and priorities are for developing the site, we will never know, I suppose.
As Chris Paton has already commented, it all feels a bit like a corporate re-branding exercise, with no new functionality or improved indexes. Also, as far as I've been able to determine with a very brief look through the search screens, all the same problems with place data are still there as documented on my Searching Scottish parishes on Scotland's People page.
Which rather begs the question, why did the NRS feel the need to do this rebrand? The previous interface did the same job and now there's much more tedious scrolling to construct searches. If there was money to spend, I would have put my vote to incorporating a way of using the feast of meta-data that the NRS have to actually help us construct valid searches.
What do I mean by this? The NRS know whether they have any data at all for specific searches. So instead of that really annoying instruction to keep refining your search when you return no results, tell us that there are NO records of that type for that parish.
Computer says no...
Equally, the NRS know the years that the records of any type span. But the year range fields are always defaulted as illustrated. How much more useful would it be if these fields were automatically populated with the oldest and newest available record years for the parish you have chosen. Or were greyed out if there were no records?
Quite frankly, I'd take this sort of enhancement over speed any day.
Quite frankly, I'd take this sort of enhancement over speed any day.
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