Research corner - finding archived documents and historic forum content

[whole diary]

[grahame]

( Earlier discussions at http://www.passenger.chat/24635 )

There are now 2,000 documents in the Coffee Shop's archive collection, of which 900 can be found through a default search using the forum's deep search facility at http://www.passenger.chat/research.html and also accessible from the box near the top of forum pages. Location shown in greeh here:



Default searches will also find matches within public forum posts which are less that three years old (there are some 50,000 posts that are searched) and stations who's names match (from 2,500 National Rail stations)


* A further 900 of the archived documents can be found if you select to report on "All resources (including archive)"; the final 200 documents are stored in various conditions awaiting attention.

* If you wish to look back to earlier forum threads, there's a option on the search page ( http://www.passenger.chat/research.html ) that lets you look into all public posts since the forum started in 2007


There are copyright issues with archived documents, and rather than make the content of them public ("publish them") ourselves, most of them are accessible to members only . If you are a guest, please remember that registration doesn't cost anything and if you have a public / sustainable transport interest with a significant UK^▸ (United Kingdom) element, you'll be welcome.

Around 100 documents in our archive are "whitelist"ed, and those are available to guests without registration as well as to members. These documents are listed at http://www.passenger.chat/whitelist.html


If you feel that our archive is missing a key document, please let me know - chosing what's in there is somewhat subjective and there will be things I have missed (and probably things included that you will wonder "why?"). All documents are stored as .pdfs - if necessary, other formats such as .doc and .html can be "printed" to .pdf and archived in that way, but with some formats and security features that might not be practical.  Spread sheets in particular can be awkward to 'reduce' to printable documents.

[grahame]

An update - Deep Search now defaults to reporting the resource with the most hits first rather than sorting by date. This is what the small print has always told you the default is, but it hasn't actually done that.  The issue came to light when I was adding the Bristol to Birmingham report in this morning.

Try entering Bristol*Birmingham into the Deep Search box - you should find the resource that I added this morning high up the list now, with 85 mentions!

[grahame]

We have now reach 1000 indexed documents in our .pdf library, with another 1000 or do still to be indexed.

      1 document dated 1845
      1 dated 1855
      1 1874
      1 1907
      1 1928
      1 1931
      1 1941
      1 1953
      1 1955
      2 1957
      2 1960
      4 1963
      2 1964
      3 1965
      1 1979
      2 1981
      1 1982
      1 1983
      2 1984
      2 1987
      1 1988
      1 1989
      1 1990
      1 1991
      3 1992
      1 1993
      2 1996
      3 2002
      1 2003
      4 2004
      4 2005
     11 2006
      4 2007
     61 2008
     21 2009
     19 2010
     26 2011
     21 2012
     57 2013
     61 2014
     72 2015
     91 2016
     77 2017
    107 2018
     81 2019
    104 2020
    107 2021
     27 2022

Indexed documents accesible to members are categoried as follows
    324 3 - of local interest
    355 5 - General documents
    214 7 - Important documents
     48 9 - Key documents
with the remaining documents being only accessible to admins, largely for copyright reasons.  110 of the documents included in the counts above are "whitelisted" so that they are available to the public even without an account.