Record Linking Prototype

Summary
This project aims to create an infrastructure whereby volunteers on the internet can collaborate to collect and organize multiple records relating to a given individual. By collaborating together we hope to create a more comprehensive and organized collection of records than any individual researcher or small group could accomplish. The records are organized by individual and linked such that when you find one record for an individual you also get a list of other records pertaining to that individual. Organization by individual is one way to organize records and is particularly convenient for genealogical and social history research.
To illustrate the approach we are in the process of organizing various records pertaining to the Arsenault surname in the Shediac and Botsford Parishes of Westmorland County, New Brunswick. Records include all census records from the 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, and 1901 censuses of Shediac and Botsford, parish records, provincial vital statistics records, locations on an 1862 map, and data from the Centre d'études acadiennes.
Examples: Vital Arsenault, Anselme Arsenault (incl. map)

Background

Modern high speed digitization technology combined with widespread internet access provides the potential for easy access to huge volumes of data. This sheer volume of data creates issues in how to access it. Millions of digitized images are of limited use unless users can find and access the specific data they are interested in, but the indexing and organization of records is an extremely labour intensive task. The internet and world wide web offer some potentially useful tools in tackling this task. The widespread connectivity offered by the internet provides the potential for large numbers of people to collaborate on organizing records while the linking capabilities of the world wide web provide an excellent tool for organizing and accessing records.

This project is based on the following key insights:

Large numbers of people are willing to work on projects if:
- the user interface is easy to learn and use
- they can work from home on their own schedule
- the resulting work is made freely available to the community,
and web interfaces provide a way to satisfy these requirements.
The hypertext linking capabilities of the web are very well suited to creating organized presentations of data
Adding structure to data enhances the ability to organize and search it in useful ways that simply aren't practical with plain text.

The 1901 Census Indexing Project was the genesis of this approach. This project uses a web interface to allow volunteers to help transcribe an index which is in turn freely available via the web. The transcription interface is easy to learn and use, volunteers can work at any time and at their own pace, and the results of their work are immediately available on the site. Because the data is stored in a structured database any number of views of the data can be generated and special purpose tools that suit a particular style of use can be constructed as needed. The records can be organized by, for example, family name or order of enumeration, and indexes can be generated and updated automatically. Transcribed data has links back to the digitized images it was produced from for verification and access to the fields in the data that weren't included in the index. The site also provides easy to use mechanisms for reporting errors and compensating for incorrect data. Both volunteer transcribers and end users have given the project very positive reviews, and over 13 million records have been transcribed so far.

The first evolutionary step toward linking records started with a project to create links from the 1901 census record for an individual to the corresponding New Brunswick birth records. Using an automated approach that matched individuals based on name and exact birth date 30,000 birth records were linked into the census.

The current prototype includes records to multiple census year records, provincial vital statistics records, parish records, map records and genealogical records. While genealogists are likely to be the biggest users the database is intended to be primarily records based, leaving ambiguous conclusions to the user.

Partial list of Arsenault records by: