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Lord Chancellors Dept

Answer

Mr. Lidington: To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department, pursuant to her answer of 20 March 2002, Official Report, column 414W, on the 1901 Census, what steps were taken to familiarise employees based in India and Sri Lanka with the handwriting and spelling used by enumerators of the 1901 Census. [47661] Ms Rosie Winterton: The data input company based in India and Sri Lanka demonstrated that it already had in-house skills at interpreting late nineteenth century handwriting by producing test results of a very high level of accuracy prior to award of contract. In order to augment these skills, 10 Public Record Office staff with expertise in interpreting census enumeration returns spent, between them, 20 weeks at the company's bases in India and Sri Lanka. They gave training sessions on the detailed transcription rules, on the formation of the handwriting to be found in the returns and on the etymology of Welsh place names. They also responded to queries raised by individual operators while they were transcribing the returns. Public Record Office staff ensured that keying operators had access to appropriate reference sources such as English and Welsh gazetteers and name listings. They also provided supervisors with detailed feedback on errors encountered during the quality assessment of the transcribed data to seek to prevent such errors reoccurring. The transcription rule for most of the data found in the 1901 census returns was to transcribe it exactly as it appeared. As a result, there was no requirement to translate 1901 spelling to its modern day equivalent.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

47661; 383 c42-3W

Session

2001-02

Subjects

Census Data processing India Public records Sri Lanka Public Record Office

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk