New Statistical Accounts of Scotland website launched

A press release from the University of Edinburgh's EDINA service:

We are delighted to announce the launch of the refreshed Statistical Accounts of Scotland online service at http://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk.

As well as a new intuitive and streamlined interface, the redeveloped service features improved search, transcripts and metadata, making it easier to find relevant information within the accounts.

The new service offers:

* Interactive historical maps
* Contextual narratives that give more information on the accounts and their history
* Parish and county pages listing all related sections within the volumes
* High resolution images

Our not-for-profit subscription service has been enhanced with additional features designed to make it easy to work with the historical texts:

* View your personal search history
* Tag pages, sections and images with keywords
* Annotate pages, sections and images with longer notes
* Browse and filter personal tags and annotations

Over the next few weeks we will publish a series of blog posts giving more details on the new features: you can follow these at http://statacc.blogs.edina.ac.uk/

COMMENT: The Statistical Accounts of Scotland site is the first platform you should bookmark after ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) if doing Scottish based ancestral research. The site contains two detailed descriptions from the 1790s and 1830s/1840s of every Church of Scotland parish, as recorded by the minister, providing essential background context onto which you can paint your ancestral stories.

From an initial exploration, the new site will take some time to get used to. On the one hand, I very much like the searchable interactive map, but I do find the pages take a lot more effort to scroll down through with such large pictures and such little boxes of text. 

Note that the original version of the website is still accesible at http://stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk/sas/sas.asp?action=public, though this will be phased out next year.

(With thanks to Nicola Osborne and Lisa Otty)

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including A Beginner's Guide to British and Irish Genealogy, A Decade of Irish Centenaries: Researching Ireland 1912-1923, Discover Scottish Church Records (2nd edition), Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html.