[Gramps-devel] sources, subsources and sourceref

[<bm...@ca...>]

Hi,

I have discussed about sources before. This time I have made an example to make
my case.

How you should work with sources is made clear in the tutorial of Richard on
census:
http://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=Recording_UK_Census_data

So you have a source, an image is connected to it with sourceref containing the
page and microfilm info.
Next data of person (event, attributes, ...) is entered and with scratchpad the
data of sourceref is repeated everywhere to make the connection to the source.

I propose to allow for another setup, using a subsource
source --> subsource -- 1 sourceref 1 -- object (person, event, attribute, ...)

Using subsources has advantages:

1/with present digitisation, websearch tools only return the one entry you look
for, not the entire page. So you have one act, a line of census info, an index
entry. Perhaps later, you will go in person and make a copy of the entire
page/book.

2/in civil offices, you can ask a copy of an act. You get only that act, not the
entire page (this is a common practise in Belgium, where you can pay to get a
nice printout of an act of one of your predecessors, eg to use as a gift).

3/people can still use the data in the way they do now. Adding this to GRAMPS
does not break the present database, or implies people MUST work differently.
Don't like it, don't use it

4/it accommodates how many people already work today. I already work in this
fashion, only GRAMPS does not support it. Looking at databases of other people,
I see many other people also work like this.


An example to show working with many sources is clearer (to be honest I made the
one source quite quickly from the many source, it could be done better):

1/file with one source for the marriages book:
http://cage.ugent.be/~bm/varia/sourceexample_true.gramps

2/file with the marriages book source split in pieces (how I actually enter it):
http://cage.ugent.be/~bm/varia/sourceexample.gramps

Please, play a bit with the above to see what in my eyes is the problem.
The source is the marriage act book of Zonnebeke 1794-1830


What I perceive as problems with sources as is now in GRAMPS:

1/I have a lot of information from some sources. This means the source has 40
images connected. This makes look-up complicated. Eg: event Occupation farmer
is coupled to the source with info: page: 40. I now want to find the picture.
Which one of the 40 has a sourcereference also containing page 40?

2/Transcription. In the example of census, Richard does not repeat the info on
the act in the note as text with the source. This often not feasible: info you
copy from a source, a Latin text, hard to read text, all need transcription.
You could make an office document and attach it to the source, but it is more
straightforward to add the text in note field of the source. However, this means
the note section blows up with 1000's of line of text, some completely unrelated
(eg transcript of marriage act of Jane Doe and John Di as well as marriage of
Britney Spies and Bradd Pass appears).

3/data retrieval/back references. What of that one line of census data is
already in your database. If all entries of that census are one big source, the
backreferences is a huge list which is useless. If one line would be a source,
you immediately see what that one line of data did to your database. The case
of retrieval of how you found an information is explained in 1/. Another
example is: born 1874. You find another source claiming 1870, and now want to
check why 1874? You go to the source of the event, which claims 'source census'
and the sourceref says page 40. How do you quickly find the image, the
transcript, ... in the huge amount of data in this source?

4/if I use the act or census line as a nucleus source, it is not actually
correct. They are part of a book, and that book is in a repository.


Using subsources can remove the above problems, as a subsource would be a
nucleus information set: one line in a census, one marriage act, ...., and that
connected to a source.

Why not use the sourceref?

The sourceref cannot be used for this! The text of an entire source, or an image
of an entire source is something you need to share between objects, so it must
be a source, not a sourceref. The note in the sourceref should only be used to
explain how the information of the source was used for the object.

However, it is true that a subsource can have a date/page/volume/number within
the larger source. Note that in the census example this is repeated on *all*
sourceref objects. In the case of a subsource, it would be entered once in the
subsource, and then not be repeated in the sourceref. I don't care to much for
this as in the case where subsource is usefull, there is no problem of
mentioning this in the note, .... section.

Is sourceref useless then?

I don't think this. For sources of which little information is learnt, or real
books (bibliography, diary, ...) the sourceref is ideal. However, for sources
which contain many unrelated short subparts that each can lead to large amount
of changes throughout your genealogical database, the sourceref is less
usefull, and a subsource is in order.

Long mail, thanks if you read this far.
I'm off on holiday. Food for some thought.

Benny

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