Public Record Office Titanic CD

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Kalman Tanito

Member
Does anyone know if the "complete" PRO CD with tons of Titanic material is available at a discounted price from somewhere? I find the price of £150 a bit hefty, even if it works out low per page...

Best regards,

Kalman Tanito
 
but is it worth the money, even at £89? I seem to remember a different thread wherein someone indicated that the information on the cd is not completely searchable. I went back through some of the older threads, and unfortunately, I can't find the one that had the information. my recollection is that the cd does not make best use of the medium, with the result that the usefullness of the cd is very limited.

anyone out there have this cd? who can fill in the blanks here on its usefullness?

best, Michael (TheManInBlack) T
 
Hi Mike,

For me it was worth the cost, even the original cost which came to almost $300 (Thankfully, my order was placed just before they lowered the cost to £99 and the PRO was kind enough to refund the difference). My initial reasoning for buying the CD was to cross check their digitized transcripts against the TIP copies.

The CD says "...over 7500 pages..." Keep in mind that there are two copies of each of the inquiries as well as their respective reports (a .TIF format photocopy and a digitized/searchable copy). This accounts for well over 4,000 pages.

From what I've seen in my forays into other areas of the CD there is a large amount of correspondence, mainly amongst British Government officials.

My opinion would be that for a person who is a Titanic fanatic and wants to spend a lot of time reading over a large amount of mostly unimportant messages and acknowledgements, and the many Thanking you for your memo of such and such a date, the CD is for you. For the average person though, between various websites on the subject the important material is already freely available.

I must apologize Mike. While this post was rather verbose, I am not entirely sure it helped with much with your question.

If you are planning on attending the Topeka get together I will be sure to bring my copy with me and those there can peruse it.

Regards,

Rob
 
The PRO CD is rather half-baked. The facsimiles of the two inquiries are incomplete. As they can't be searched, you need to make your own index if you want to find a particular passage. The searchable texts of the inquiries are inaccurate and slipshod. They look like the result of second-rate OCR. Rob Ottmers and friends have done a far better job, even fixing blatant misprints in the originals.

Many of the .tif documents are not indexed at all and the index to those that are is pretty woeful. As .tif documents are not searchable, you just have to hope that you find something useful among a pile of stuff indexed as 'Parliamentary Questions' or somesuch vague term.

It's your money!
 
If you want an even more exciting experience, try searching the through the rolls of Titanic microfilm at the PRO itself (have done so when I can gird myself to do it - cue shudder!)
 
thanks Rob & Dave. it was the lack of any effective indexing that I was remembering, which makes the cd a whole lot less useful than it might have been.

Inger, you have all the fun. ;-)
best, Michael (TheManInBlack) T
 
About this CD Inger, didn't PRO put all of their Titanic collection and documents on the CD? What I'm trying to get at is, all those microfilms you're searching, aren't they all on this CD?
 
I gather so, Daniel - it's one reason why I'm too cheap to buy the CD ;-) I'm assuming that all 70 odd rolls of microfilm have been copied over to the CD (plus odds and ends like the CR10 files).
 

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