On keeping old documents available for referenceThere are 3313 links to ".pdf" files on the Coffee Shop (2363 different ones), some dating back over a decade. Older links - in particular offsite ones - die over time, and for historic reasons we are starting to archive them on our server - via
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/mirror ... follow that link, and you'll find that so far we have 1647 documents with (so far) 326 indexed and listed on that page.
To help navigate, I have applied some 'classification' - using the word "level".
22 documents at level 9 - current key documents
80 documents at level 7 - important documents
103 documents at level 5 - regular documents
126 documents at level 3 - now really there for the historic record
All of the above can be viewed
by members via links on the left of the mirror index page. 28 of them are alo accessible to all site visitors (none-members can see that we hold the other documents, but need to register and login to access content)
326 out of 1647 doesn't sound like a high proportion, but I have started with all the larger ones, so that in practice much or even most is already available in the lists. I would expect to increase the 326 over coming weeks and months and to be adding other documents too.
As well as the archives of ".pdf" files that members have referred to, I have added some new (old) documents - you will find key Beeching, Serpell and privatisation documents in the "key" and "important" documents, and my historic rail and transport blogs in the regular documents.
Old "Save the Train" forum posts and blog articles will be added in due course. They are already available or Archive
here (forum) and
here (blog). There are so many separate articles there (on each of them) that they would drown out the other content; I will add them in due course, but need to do some work to combine them into logical 'stories'.
And on searching old documents and elsewhereOne of the beauties of having all the documents in one place is that we can move towards a system under which you (the user) can look for something and find it whether it was in a referenced document on any one of 101 sites, on one of the blogs we have mirrored, or in a post on the forum.
At present, there are two routes to searching.
1. The
search box an the base of the header block on forum pages will search the 326 indexed documents (subject line and text content) and all public posts on the forum. You can also go direct to it at
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/search.html . For historic reasons (to be changed!) it defaults to searching for "Rosslare" if you don't give a search string - scroll down and below the results you can change that!
2. The
Document mirror page will offer you the 326 indexed documents too (default). If you click to report on "all" and enter a search string, it looks in 1430 of the .pdf files we hold, including those which are not yet titled and indexed.
A number of document are old ones which were scanned, and others include pictures with text on them. We have not done any Optical Character Recognition on them, so these documents will not turn up in search results based on text within them - just on subject. For example, if you're looking for the Beeching report, you'll find it if you look for "Beeching" but not if you look for "Pocklington" even though it appears on page 99 of the report.
There are also documents which were in files named ".pdf" but were actually not Portable Document Files (servers can tell the browser the file type!) or for which our automated mirroring routine was redirected to a resource of a different type. These remain on our server, but not indexed or searched.
Day to day, few members will be doing detailed searches but the resources remain and are important for the future and history. So - please - if you try and use the resource and find it doesn't work for you, let me know. I can probably fix / sort out / help develop and you may well be the only one to be reporting. It'll actually be quite nice to have a few people try out / visit this area