22 August 2007

New Gazettes Online in beta

If you're looking for official announcements in England you go to the London Gazette, one of the country's oldest continuing publications. It's best known as the place to find legal notices on bankruptcy, calls for claims on the estates of recently deceased people, notices of military promotions and medals awarded; and an often overlooked genealogy source.

Although an OCRd version of the London Gazette has been freely available to search online for some while its been difficult to use. Results have been shown as pdf pages and required a slow process of opening each one to review the content. Now there's a beta version that shows a preview snippet of each item, a substantial improvement. To see the full item you still have to open the pdf.

It would be nice to see the search term highlighted on the page, and also the search capability more advanced to allow exclusions (-Middlesex) and proximity (within 5) type searches.

No comments: