Irish Newspaper Archives - speed

L1011 · 19-03-2013 10:37pm #1

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 · 19-03-2013 10:42pm

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 · 19-03-2013 10:52pm

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 · 19-03-2013 11:52pm

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 · 20-03-2013 2:39am

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 · 21-03-2013 10:52pm

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 · 21-03-2013 11:07pm

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 · 01-05-2013 9:42pm

does this seem even slower recently ?

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

mickmackey1 · 16-05-2013 6:15pm

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 · 08-06-2013 5:42pm

Now I'm getting this message :

Does anyone know what's going on?

L1011 · 02-09-2013 8:15pm

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 · 29-10-2013 10:12am

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 · 04-11-2013 6:35pm

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

pedroeibar1 · 05-11-2013 12:02am

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 · 06-11-2013 1:41am

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 · 06-11-2013 1:28pm

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 · 19-11-2013 4:54pm

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 · 20-11-2013 3:54pm

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 · 13-12-2013 3:01pm

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

Jellybaby1 · 13-12-2013 8:21pm

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 · 13-12-2013 11:13pm

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 · 14-12-2013 3:04am

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 · 14-12-2013 9:41pm

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 · 14-12-2013 9:50pm

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 · 14-12-2013 11:54pm

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 · 15-12-2013 10:52am

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 · 28-12-2013 5:03pm

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 · 29-12-2013 3:18pm

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 · 29-12-2013 8:06pm

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 · 16-02-2014 2:00pm

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 · 16-02-2014 4:43pm

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.

Irish Newspaper Archives - speed

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