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Monday, October 22, 2007
VRT Fee Structure Under Review
The SIG has commissioned a study of the fee structure for both the VRT project as well as all other record acquisitions.
Inputs have been solicited from various coordinators of major SIG projects, and the VRT coordinators have made their views
known to the committee.
The committee is now going over the ideas presented. Stay tuned to this blog for developments.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Change in VRT project responsibilities
As of this week, Aaron Roetenberg assumes the responsibility for all Kovno gubernia towns. This change was precipitated
by several factors. Firstly, the project had nearly been divided by gubernia after the conference in New York on 2006. It
was decided at that time that since Aaron was also SIG Treasurer, he would have his hands full with those duties and he would
not assume the larger Kovno gubernia projects [Kovno, Vilijampole, and Vilkija]. At this time however, the situation is such
that Aaron does not have enough funds to translate records for many of his smaller Kovno towns. This is the case for several
reasons - he has managed to spend down many of the accounts [good news, because that means he has been distributing translations]
and because there has been a slow response in the researcher community to support the VRT Project of late. This is typical
of the summer months, with the exception of whatever is raised at the Conference. The result of this is there are translators
for Kovno gubernia towns awaiting assignment. the natural thing to do was to give Aaron added responsibilities and the result
was to assign him Kovno, Vilijampole and Vilkija. There is now a clear delineation of responsibility - Aaron coordinates all
Kovno gubernia towns, and Joel coordinates all Vilna and Suwalki gubernia towns. Keep in mind this blog is meant to deal with
the filmed records only. The SIG has added all unfilmed vital records to this project rather than creating a separate project.
In order to bring us all together, the SIG is now discussing a way to integrate the VRT website into the LitvakSIG
site. The site will have to be restructured so the coordinator for each gubernia can update their pages. I intend to maintain
this blog on this site for the forseeable future.
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The Vital Records Indexing Project grew out of the newly gained access to the Lithuanian Archives
in the late 1990s. The Archives and the Family History Library [FHL or Mormons] came to an agreement which allowed
the filming of the metrical register books. These books cover the 19th Century and include 20th Century
records through 1915.
LitvakSIG came to agreement with the Archives and the FHL which provides LitvakSIG with digital images
[TIF files] of the vital records in exchange for translations we produce.
The Records
The images
contain records for 100 towns which were in Vilna and Kovno gubernias, with a few towns from Suwalki gubernia as well. Prior
to conversion to digital format, the records were contained on 225 microfilms. There are approximately 200,000 unique images
and with an average of 4 records per page, there are approximately 800,000 records in total. This estimate is after subtracting
20% of the films to account for the approximate number of duplicate pages, register book cover pages, etc. The list of towns
represented was developed by FHL and JewishGen and posted to the JewishGen web site. Updates to this list have been required
and LitvakSIG maintains the current version of this information – more on that later.
The Translations
The images provided to LitvakSIG are organized by the microfilm they came from, rather
than the town the records cover. LitvakSIG received the films as digital images and began translating various films. It was
immediately apparent this was not an efficient way to proceed, since records for many towns exist on a single film [sometimes
over 10 towns per film]. We have taken the 200,000 images and have reordered the images by town. We are now better able to
coordinate the translations on a town by town basis.
The Translators
The beginning of the translation effort saw a few volunteer translators come forth, although
the primary need is for paid translators. The project is of such a large scope it is necessary to employ paid translators.
Some of the translations submitted by volunteers are of good quality, whereas others had to be scrapped. We are currently
reformatting and correcting some of the early work to save that which is useable.
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