Irish Newspaper Archives - speed

L1011

Does anyone know if the Irish Newspaper Archives site always runs at the speed of molasses on a cold day, or if its just a temporary issue?

The two Nenagh papers they have in have absolutely rakes of entries for one arm of my family (the only one with a bit of money, at least in an area they cover) but its taking anywhere from 20 seconds up to 4 minutes to load a single image at the moment, and minutes for a search too - even when limited to those two papers

If its any faster at other times, I'll write todays tenner off and give it a go another time... fantastic resource all the same (for covered areas), managed to get two exact death dates already tonight which would have been 8 quid in the GRO as well as nearly every other article that's loaded being about someone I'm interested in, the wonders of an uncommon surname there.

Coolnabacky1873

I've done a few random searches over the last few months and noticed that too.

There is a Brooklyn newspaper that I use a lot and it has the exact same search interface as INA. That one laods at normal Broadband speeds though.

shanew

I've used it quite a bit, and it definitely has it's slow periods. I also find that if you have a big number of search results to search through (i.e. 100s), that you need to plough through to check, it can get very slow part way through....

If this happens I find it best to back off, and try again, either later after a break, or at a different time of the day. So I keep notes as to exact search terms and which pages and articles I've checked, so I can drop back in.

I think the system is shared by libraries ?

might account for the slow periods, possibly due to heavy traffic 9 to 5 ?
... it seems best speed is early morning..

L1011

It oddly was much faster on a result set with 97 than it is now on a set of 9.

Think its still worth fighting through, moving towards some Dublin things I have to figure out.

Jellybaby1

I find it very slow also. But when I accessed it in the NLI it seemed a bit faster than at home, so maybe its something to do with our internet speeds? I would like to see more than the five results per page also. It needs rethinking, that site.

jos28

Have you tried using the Irish Times archives, it's a much nicer interface and a lot faster. You are restricted to the one newspaper though.

L1011

jos28 wrote: »

Have you tried using the Irish Times archives, it's a much nicer interface and a lot faster. You are restricted to the one newspaper though.

I've access to it through a university sub and I've found one article in its entire archive so far. Compared to ~100 from the Nenagh Guardian alone. Unfortunate as the ProQuest interface is far, far quicker.

shanew

does this seem even slower recently ?

tried a couple of searches recently and had to wait 5 or 10 minutes per page...

mickmackey1

Yep same problem, I lost at least two hours of my sub owing to poor speeds & sent them an email to complain, predictably no response :mad:

mickmackey1

Now I'm getting this message :



Does anyone know what's going on?

L1011

Decided to throw another few quid at this and its still infuriatingly slow - albeit it might be a little better than it was. As always I find something of interest within five minutes meaning I'm going to be stuck on it for an entire night.

Having one arm of the family that were slightly better off, had a shop and got involved in local politics a bit has ensured I've got a few hundred too many things to sift through!

shanew

article on Claire's blog re new titles and an upcoming system upgrade to the Irish Newspaper Archives - hopefully sort out the speed issues.

http://irish-genealogy-news.blogspot.ie/2013/10/irish-newspaper-archive-new-titles-and.html

mickmackey1

Well its totally wrecked at the mo, wouldn't like to have forked out €25 while waiting for the 'upgrade'

pedroeibar1

Just tried Claire Santry's Irish Gen News page link to the demo - I end up with an Irish Newspaper Archive webpage, mainly blank and with no links working. Why is it that so many Irish Geno site owners are such total amateurs when it comes to marketing?

mickmackey1

And the search function can only be narrowed down to the nearest year, surely that will revert to the preceding facility (i.e. to an exact day); it was very useful for finding death notices etc.

Jellybaby1

mickmackey1 wrote: »

And the search function can only be narrowed down to the nearest year, surely that will revert to the preceding facility (i.e. to an exact day); it was very useful for finding death notices etc.

I have previously trawled through INA for weeks on end and did eventually harvest a few death notices - shattered at the end of it but really pleased. Really wish it could have worked faster though.

pinkypinky

Reactivated my sub to play with the new layout and am so far not impressed. It locked me out because I temporarily navigated away from the main page (to another page on their site) and then back to it. When I got back in, it's really slow at searching. I'm also still getting the dodgy site warning that mickmackey1 noted a while back. I'd really like a list showing gaps, rather than just the dates covered. On the positive side, I like the browse function.

odds_on

Jellybaby1 wrote: »

I have previously trawled through INA for weeks on end and did eventually harvest a few death notices - shattered at the end of it but really pleased. Really wish it could have worked faster though.

Now, that's research!

mickmackey1

You have to search by individual newspaper now and previous searches are no longer remembered - it's just a shambles I'm afraid

Jellybaby1

I haven't been on much since they changed the site. I've found more information which means I will be back searching for death notices again soon. Don't think I can face it this side of Christmas though.

mickmackey1

The only reason can be that they just don't have the money to maintain the old web servers - I don't want to be too hard on them if they're a family run business, but they won't be getting any more shekels from me.

Just a shame that all that lovely information can't be properly accessed.

L1011

mickmackey1 wrote: »

You have to search by individual newspaper now and previous searches are no longer remembered - it's just a shambles I'm afraid

While I did generally search specific papers, it being forced on you is a mess.

eqwjewoiujqorj

They say they will have these issues fixed by end of Jan

http://www.irishnewsarchive.com/wp/?p=33

Our new search has being up a for a few weeks now and we are delighted to hear that users seem to be really enjoying the new layout.


That said there have being some features which users have requested we look at implementing to make your searching experience that little bit easier.


We are hoping to implement all of the below features by the end of January 2014.


- Full Date Range Filter (dd/mm/yyyy - dd/mm/yyyy) for searching
- Next & Previous Issue buttons for browsing
- Multi-Publication Select for searching
- WebMail Form for emailing articles


Check back for updates on the progress of the above new features.

eqwjewoiujqorj

http://www.irishnewsarchive.com/wp/?p=16

Just took the following from their blog, where users asked about particular papers.

Tipperary Vindicator
We do not currently have any plans to add the Tipp. Vindicator I'm afraid. We are hoping to get a title from every county in Ireland up by the end of 2015 so that is the direction we are going with title selection.


The Mayo News
We are actually working on the Mayo News right now, it is scheduled for release Jun/Jul 2014.

Sligo Champion
We are currently scanning the Sligo Champion from hard-copy from 1950-2006, We are hoping to have this online by the end of March next year.

Roscommon papers
The Roscommon papers are only available within the Roscommon branch libraries due to an agreement reached between ourselves and the library.

Clare Champion
Unfortunately we don't have a date for inclusion of the Clare Champion just yet.

Dundalk Democrat
Coming very soon

L1011

eqwjewoiujqorj wrote: »

Tipperary Vindicator
We do not currently have any plans to add the Tipp. Vindicator I'm afraid. We are hoping to get a title from every county in Ireland up by the end of 2015 so that is the direction we are going with title selection.

They already *have* the Tipperary Vindicator I thought? "Nenagh News & Tipperary Vindicator" is the paper name I have on a few files here.

shanew

what the speed like after the update ?

must ask them about some Wicklow papers - spent literally days browsing the Wicklow people in the NLI going goggle eyed checking for an article I've been told about on my grandfather when he excelled in the civil service exam - 'Local boy does good..' or similar!

L1011

I've found that you now need to work in time blocks to get the site to work properly at all, e.g. a 1901-2003 (there's a reason for not going to 2013 in my case, due to someone with the same surname appearing in the paper constantly since then) search of the Donegal News causes it to give an Internal Server Error, but 1901-1920 works fine, as does 1921-1940, etc.

The text view showing what the OCR of the text has come through as shows how incredibly poor it is at times (a limitation of OCR in general rather than the INA). There's definitely still merit in browsing the papers one by one as had to be done in the past.

shanew

Speed is definitely better and much more consistent than it was. Did a number of searches, some quite complex, over the last few days, and even though some were (understandably) a little slow, they were consistent, and always succeeded for me. Found a few additional details I missed before.

Some of the new navigation takes a little getting getting used to, maybe could be made a little simpler switching between browse and search modes, whilst keeping track of a search.

Jellybaby1

Do you get the feeling INA are checking in here and taking the suggestions on board? If so, then it can only get better!

mickmackey1

According to here and here, they have now implemented these improvements... but I just don't see them on the search page... Do you actually have to subscribe before you can use e.g. the 'All titles' check-box...?

KildareFan

mickmackey1 wrote: »

According to here and here, they have now implemented these improvements... but I just don't see them on the search page... Do you actually have to subscribe before you can use e.g. the 'All titles' check-box...?

I have the subscription service and you can now choose multiple titles for a search.

If 'they' are monitoring this thread, can they do something about getting out of the full page mode back to search. There's a kind of floating menu where you can get back to search, but it doesn't always show up on the full page and if you hit the back button, you're dumped out completely.

mickmackey1

Must say the site has improved, more professional layout now but €10 for just 24 hours still too steep for me, especially when...

...the British Newspaper Archive can now be accessed for a whole month for just £1, at least until Sunday. Grab it while you can, it's addictive

L1011

Speed has improved anyway; I managed to actually run out of stuff I could think of in a 48 hour window.

The problem is that you really still need to have a lot longer and scan over pages manually as the OCR is really, really poor on older papers.

mickmackey1

mickmackey1 wrote: »

...the British Newspaper Archive can now be accessed for a whole month for just £1, at least until Sunday. Grab it while you can, it's addictive

I may be wrong about that actually, you probably need to be a former subscriber to get the promotion code, which then activates the £1 offer...

pedroeibar1

Used this in the NLI a couple of times recently, very slow, which is 'livable with' but what drove me demented was the inability of the same search parameters to find previously found searches. e.g. three specific 'keywords' produced six articles; then, a few days later the same 3 words produced just two articles and I could not find any others. Any suggestions?
Also, the Irish Times database is not available - am I mistaken that it was accessible before?

Alicat

I don't recall the IT ever being on that. I'm quite sure you've to get a separate sub from the IT's own archive website.

pedroeibar1

The IT is a separate icon on the PCs in the Gen. Room. I though I had accessed their DB before in the NLI, the icon is still on the screens, opens for a search but when the 'finds' are shown a click on them says a subscription is required.

pinkypinky

What did Fran and Christina say about the IT sub? Afaik, all libraries and schools have free access to the IT as long as they ask for it.

pedroeibar1

The guy I asked (I'm not a regular, don't know name) said he was unfamiliar with it, which I thought rather odd but as I was in a lousy humour over the other Archive problem I said nothing in case I crossly (crassly?) suggested that somebody had forgotten to pay the sub!

Qualitymark

I find this site unspeakable. I use it in the local library occasionally. I've got different results from the same search often. But the worst thing is that you can't save a result. The best I've been able to do is save an image of what's on the screen - and then go and hunt down the article on microfilm in Pearse Street. I pity people from outside Dublin who can't do this.
It also has a wildly random set of newspapers, and doesn't have some of the most important newspapers at all.

pinkypinky

I don't have a sub for them at the moment but I've definitely been able to save articles before on it.

Qualitymark

pinkypinky wrote: »

I don't have a sub for them at the moment but I've definitely been able to save articles before on it.

I thought I had too, but last week I was trying desperately to save a long article from 1911 through the library's subscription, and attach it to an email to send home to print out and study further. Woudn't happen. Nope.

pinkypinky

Well, I don't know about saving on the library pcs but you can print out (in the NLI).

Qualitymark

mm. I've tried printing it out (in local library) with disastrous results. I'll go for the microfilm option.

KildareFan

I agree there are lots of problems with the site, including different results from putting in key words. However, I have now discovered that I can download a PDF for any articles I'm interested in, then save to a USB or my own PC. Not sure if that's available if you're using a library computer. One of the benefits of downloading the PDF is that I can enlarge on screen and actually read the article. Some of the printouts are unreadable because they download a whole page onto a single A4 page.

It's interesting to compare with the Australian trovit site which allows users to correct text. It's also free.

Qualitymark

KildareFan wrote: »

I agree there are lots of problems with the site, including different results from putting in key words. However, I have now discovered that I can download a PDF for any articles I'm interested in, then save to a USB or my own PC. Not sure if that's available if you're using a library computer. One of the benefits of downloading the PDF is that I can enlarge on screen and actually read the article. Some of the printouts are unreadable because they download a whole page onto a single A4 page.

It's interesting to compare with the Australian trovit site which allows users to correct text. It's also free.

How do you download the PDF?

Yeah, trovit's great, as is the US Library of Congress site.

KildareFan

How do you download the PDF?

If you have the version I use, open the article view window; click on the little disk icon [like the old floppy disk] on the left of the article view window; a window should pop up saying open as... Click on the PDF button, the article then opens in a PDF file which you can then save to a usb or your own PC. Hope this makes sense.

Qualitymark

KildareFan wrote: »

How do you download the PDF?

If you have the version I use, open the article view window; click on the little disk icon [like the old floppy disk] on the left of the article view window; a window should pop up saying open as... Click on the PDF button, the article then opens in a PDF file which you can then save to a usb or your own PC. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks, I'll give this a try. Great if it works!