Re: Help with missing accident data

Brian Robertson wrote:
GazK wrote:
Dear all,


[other stuff snipped]


Gaz, I can't help with your enquiries, but can I take this opportunity to say what an amazing website I think that you have? I confess to being absolutely in awe of it.

Can you tell us a little about it? Where the idea came from? Who runs it apart from you? I can't believe it is just one person.

Kind regards for the New Year.

Brian.

Brian,

It's very kind of you to say so. The site, despite appearances, is run by me, from a 10' x 6' spare room in rural Wiltshire in my spare time.

However, the bulk of the documents are scanned and supplied not by me, but by other like-minded souls, who come forward and volunteer to scan documents which they either own or have access to. You can see here that quite a number of people have been involved in this over the last four years:

http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/credits.php

My role is to create the data for each document and/or accident, turn the scans into PDFs, and think of new bells and whistles to add to the site, like the recently added charts. And most importantly, to persuade people to help with scanning. I spend about an hour a day on the site during the week, and a bit more at weekends.

The archive was started in September of 2004, as a result of my frustration at the non-availability of important documents on the web - in my case, the Beeching Reports. Yes, they were on the web, but the way they were presented did not do them justice. I realised that, despite conventional wisdom, the whole sum of human knowledge is *not* online. Before about 1992, documents were not published electronically and little was available. After this date, most items were available, but were scattered in a variety of locations and formats.

So rather than moaning, I decided to see if I could do better - with the emphasis placed on useability - i.e. getting people to the information they need as quickly as possible. In practise, this meant having a database behind the site, so that documents could be searched for a la Google. This would then bring together four of my hobbies:

- website design
- relational database design
- (very amateur) programming
- railway history & politics

My initial intention was to hold a small number of key documents - the modernisation plan, acts of parliament, that kind of thing.

But then a couple of individuals got in touch, both saying much the same thing. Stuart Johnson and Nick Smith both had substantial collections of accident reports - would I like them scanned?

At this point the archive had a handful of reports, and planned to *maybe* add all the "Red for Danger" reports in the fullness of time, *if* we could get them.

I made a mental shift, and began to rebuild the site to be capable of collating, adding, and navigating a large number of railway accidents and reports. Meanwhile, Stuart & Nick were as good as their word and got scanning. In two years they provided over 600 documents and scanned over 6000 pages.

From there we have gone from strength to strength. We get between 10000 and 15000 visitors a month, a shade under 1/2 million hits, and we're serving up 50odd gigabits of PDF downloads a month.

Was there anything else you wanted to know?

.

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