Aberdeen Harbour Board Arrivals Transcription Project

A blog post by Mollie Horne, Project Archivist at Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives and Ian Watt of Code The City.

The arrivals transcription project is an ongoing partnership between Code the City and Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives. It forms part of a wider project funded by the Archives Revealed initiative funded by The National Archives which aims to improve the accessibility of records.

The arrival registers are a small part of a much larger collection which was transferred to Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives as a result of a partnership with the Aberdeen Harbour Board.

The project was originally intended to be part of the physical Code the City 19 event in April 2020 but in anticipation of the nationwide restrictions, it was decided to move entirely online. In the week before we were told to work from home, Mollie photographed each individual page (all 649 of them) from the arrival registers from 1914-1920 and uploaded them to the Google Sheets system which had been set up by Ian. This meant that we had a large amount of material which could be worked on for an extended period.

After creating a set of guidelines and helpful links, we invited the public to work on transcribing and checking entries from March 27th onwards. As the online CTC19 event was scheduled for 11-12th April this allowed us two weeks to create enough data to be useful to the coders over the official weekend.

Transcribers accessed two Google sheets. The first was to log their participation and note what photograph they were transcribing.

The second sheet was the one into which they transcribed the data.

We also set up an open Slack group where transcribers could chat, ask questions, get help etc.

Progress was rapid: by the end of the weekend almost 4,000 records had been transcribed and checked. At the time of writing (2nd May 2020) that has now grown to over 7,000 records transcribed.

When an image has been transcribed, and checked, we lock off the entries to preserve them form change.

The data which had been transcribed was used to create a website, set up by Andrew Sage of CTC, where we could see information in a collated an organised way – this was extremely useful to inform other transcriptions. So far we have managed to fully complete 1914 and are working through the rest of the years.

The arrivals transcription project started as a great way to highlight an important time in the history of the Harbour, which has always been a big part of Aberdeen. However, given current circumstances, it has also become a great opportunity to give people something to focus on.

The project remains open – and you can still get involved by contributing just an hour or two of your time. Start here.