From Screen to Book to Future Generations
Having created our 2,055 page website, including primary sources text, memories, photos and resident addresses, we wanted to make available in other formats.
This was to address the issue of LEGACY, how do you KNOW that will be available in decades to come? Well you save it in multiple formats both digital and physical.
Firstly as a book. This is made possible bcause it is stored as a relational database and the elements of the text (Name, Address, Memories) can be recombined and sorted in limetless ways. All modern websites can do this and we use and open source platform called Drupal (supported by 1,000s of developers and relied on by organisations such as Sony, Amnesty International, Tesla, UNISEF...) and a feature called Views.
This does a lot of the hard work and when combined with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) does most of the preparation for the book. This is KEY to making the project cost effective. If you had to go through each entry, identify each element (image, heading, Title etc) select them and apply a style this would be 10s of thousands of manual updates and would take many months. We have to find ways to do this automatically. Views starts by gathering all the records, sorting by surname and also grouping by surname (where their is more than one)
This results in a very long webpage that can be copied and pasted into MSWORD. It allows us to identify and hide sillouette photos that are useful on the web but a waste for the book and style headings that can be selected in word and the correct styling applied. Once In MSWORD we can use FindReplace to select 800 photos at once and right hand Justify.
Once complete we can return to Drupal Views and create a listing that groups by Street and add this at the end of the book.
We can also then save the contents in multiple formats (all of which can be copied to a £5 memory stick and taped into the ISBN book given to National Archives, British Library and local Libraries and schools)
- MS Word
- TXT - simple text file
- CSV - Simple spreadsheet with headings
- PHP/MySQL - dynamic website format
- HTML - a static website format that requires no database engine and can run from a memory stick
Finally it can re adapted to run well on https://Archive.org which guarantees it will be here for future generations
Now to the site and a civilian record and a servicemans record