Scotch-Irish-L Archives
Archiver > Scotch-Irish > 2010-06 > 1277169254
From: "judith brown" <>
Subject: Re: [S-I] New CD Rom Londonderry databases
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:14:14 -0400
References: <COL114-W5266414D956BEEF793E9D0D5C30@phx.gbl><291723432.9330501277157064573.JavaMail.root@sz0165a.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <291723432.9330501277157064573.JavaMail.root@sz0165a.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net>
Linda, if you have the CD I could meet you and mass produce them and send them around the country for about $3.00 including shipping.
-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:] On Behalf Of
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2010 5:51 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [S-I] New CD Rom Londonderry databases
Hi Robert, I am sure you have good emanners but you've probably been done in by Microsoft and Hotmail or Comcast.
I will send you a test email from a non comcast account and see if that works.
You can figure out the cost yourself by pretending to order the product from Ulster Historical Foundation. It'll vary constantly. Another problem is this:
https://www.booksireland.org.uk/index.php?id=697&backPID=697
I got about $22 and change. Probably not unreasonable for a CD but...
I got this message though, which frankly made me angry: "CUSTOMERS IN THE USA should note that a number of people have experienced delays of up to a month with airmail parcels, we believe that this may be security linked and is beyond our control. Thank you for your patience."
This is why we don't like to order stuff from overseas. It does cost money to bulk ship books here, but you can ship one CD to Ulster Heritage and he can burn them on demand. I guess I am saying we got no patience <grin>. We are used to ordering instantly from Amazon and getting it in no time.
Another option is ship from Global Genealogy in Canada. global genealogy .com This works and only usually takes a week or so to clear US customs. I think shipping to Canada is a lot easier from the UK than to the US -- possibly cheaper. Donno....
I used to work in marketing and also worked for a small US based publisher of free books. They found that people were unwilling to pay for postage for a free book and to have to wait 3 or 4 weeks for it to possibly arrive in Australia (etc). Maybe the book came. And if not, well then what do you do? Unless you paid extra money you can't even track it because it came book rate. The free book wasn't free any more <grin>. Actually you could download most of our books in PDF off the website free, but people wanted a book so they were not tethered to their computer.
Instant downloading didn't seem to impact the demand for free books.
Thus we shipped large flats of books to Australia, the UK and the far east for local distribution with unending problems with customs. Sometimes the flats spent weeks in customs while customers demanded their books (which they could download free off the Internet!). Very strange.....
Even the genealogists in the Republic know how to do this now. One I hired sent my client's order of birth certificates in a trackable format that came in a week. Now that we loved. Waiting for the certificate from Ireland is a form of purgatory we are all too familiar with over here. We wanted this one fast (Irish citizenship) so I used this genealogist I know who lives on the west coast and she walked up to the window in Roscommon and got it in no time for us.
More and more too, the self publishing industry is moving towards delivering instant content via the web. This means via PDF or some such format that is instantly downloadable. I have been researching self publishing for a book that is in the final stages for a client. We'll probably print a minimum number of copies and offer PDF: lower cost to us, lower cost to the purchaser, who can also search the thing far easier (so less time indexing), plus instant gratification. One can purchase a marketing package through various on line self publishers including lulu. This means no wait at all for it to come in the mail, instant gratification. If I can download something and get it right now I am far more likely to buy it and so are most people. Give them a little think time and they are less likely to buy it. That's why there is an ice cream store on every corner.
wwww.ulsterheritage.com sells things. With a partner in Canada and one in the USA you figure out the best way to go (ship master copy to Canada and burn locally, upload contents to website for download, etc, etc, etc. Your data might be too complex for easy download. We're not the most technical lot, us genealogy people.
Using proprietary formats like Excel also can reduce sales to people with Macs and Linux, though on Linux you can use Open Office so this is only a problem, I think, for the less technical. In an on-line class I am in, less technical people did have issues with course content arriving in a bewildering number of Microsoft formats (One lady had an Apple: it took one on one assistance by an Apple employee to get her reading documents. She was confused when every different document opened up in a different application (that she may or may not have)). Our instructors have shrunk back from using so many types of docs due to these issues. No more Mind Maps (which is okay....mine doesn't map so well anyway <grin>). Their insistence on Mp3s will delay my migration to Linux I think (though Magic Jack is the big problem).
If these formats are editable you got a possible issue too: distinguishing between delivered content and customer mods. Does this matter? I donno.....I'm mulling it over myself for 'our' book. We'd like to make the raw data available too.
The other issue is copyright laws. Is any of this data copyrighted? I do not know what the policy is of PRONI. I do know some of the repositories I got data from stipulate that it is for personal use only and not republication. SO I will either have to strip it out, if from a source unique to that repository, or just reference the book I found in the place and not say where I found it. If I were caught redistributing images from, say, Ancestry, I think I'd be in trouble. I have whole books from Heritage Quest .... can I fry them into my CD? I donno....I realize I must research each source individually to see what I can do.
I also wonder about the sourcing. These days you can take something like the 1766 Religious Census. What's that mean? It exists in a larger collection, possibly several (I don't recall) as a hand written document. Someone transcribes it. Who and what is their background? There are published versions of it transcribed carefully by someone who was trained to read the handwriting of the period, but the internet is peppered with transcriptions made by anyone. I just want to know....
I do genealogy professionally and I'd have to be able to source the info back to something more than a CD which is why I ask. I have a few of these now and they look kinda lame in a footnote because of the complexities of dealing with manuscript material. If the collection makes it clear which instance of the 1766 Religious Census it has and its derivation then it becomes worth more.
Sorry about this email, people. However if anyone else is considering self publishing a CD or has done so (without getting sued for copyright infringement <grin>), I'd appreciate hearing about it.
Both the website on on northern Antrim and the CD look very promising and I'd like to get the CD and spend some hours on the website. However I hate ordering stuff from the Ulster Historical Society, frankly, and waiting and waiting and waiting. They could sell a lot more books in the USA if they had a distributor over here. The books are not marketed in the USA which is also a massive problem.
Dr. McMasters has written a number of very wonderful books, sold through them, but they're expensive and hard to even learn about in the USA. The Ulster Historical Foundation is not an effective way to sell or more importantly market books in America. Scotch-Irish Merchants doesn't even have a listing in www.Amazon.com .
Thanks for telling us about the CD and watch for a test email.
Linda Merle
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Forrest" <>
To:
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2010 3:44:16 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [S-I] New CD Rom Londonderry databases
Dear Linda -
for some reason I have not received your private e-mails so I hope you don't mind I use SI to defend myself [I always have good 'e - manners' and reply to personal e-mails in the same way as if someone wrote me a letter].
With regard to the CD Rom it is for sale at Ulster Historical Foundation bookshop but perhaps postage is prohibitive with regard to the cost??
http://www.booksireland.org.uk/
Could someone let me know how much the CD Rom costs to purchase in USA from the Ulster Historical Foundation when you go to the basket, including postage. I would appreciate that, please and then I could discuss this with Billy Macafee.
[With regard to the recession, it has impacted yes I have noticed as I have one brother-in-law who has lost a job and having problems paying his mortgage and another brother-in-law down to 2 days per week so there is a lot of distress in all of this].
See Linda - I have responded to your post <grin> and I am always delighted to hear from you!!
Bobby
PS - here is my private e-mail for future reference!
> Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:19:05 +0000
> From:
> To:
> Subject: Re: [S-I] New CD Rom Londonderry databases
>
> Hi Robert, the CD information seems wonderful. I would like to buy the CD but I have some concerns.
>
> I sent you a private email because you had emailed me twice about this CD before. You never responded to either of my emails. I don't know what the problem is -- but not responding to emails when you are trying to sell something IS a problem <grin>.
>
> The biggest problem is there is no way to buy it in America. Perhaps you haven't noticed there in Northern Ireland, but there's a recession on. Even more than before, postage costs a lot. Generally speaking people don't eagerly buy things overseas -- it's much harder to sue people (for one thing). That's why Eneclann has an American distributor of its CDs.
>
> So work out a deal with www.ulsterheritage.com to sell the CD or use Amazon or some other mechanism to distribute it. Then you'll sell some CDs in something faster than a trickle.
>
> Sorry to post this to the list but Robert never responds to my emails, so I'm glad to see him post. Maybe he'll actually respond to this. I hope!
>
> Linda Merle
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Forrest" <>
> To:
> Sent: Monday, June 21, 2010 2:33:00 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: [S-I] New CD Rom Londonderry databases
>
>
> Billy Macafee's new CD Rom of databases comed highly recommended for those interested in the period 1600-1800 County Londonderry.
>
>
>
> A key feature of the CD is the inclusion of databases containing names and places within the county covering the years 1622 to 1859. These are available in both Excel and PDF formats. These include the standard census substitutes – the 1630 Muster Rolls, the 1663 Hearth Money Rolls, the 1740 Protestant Householders’ Returns, the 1766 Religious Census and the 1796 Flaxgrowers’ List. Two important databases on the CD are the 1831 Census Returns [unique to the county] which list virtually all heads of households within the county at that time and the 1858/59 Griffith’s [Tenement] Valuation which lists the occupiers of houses and holdings in the county at that time.
>
> As well as databases containing lists of names and places there are a number of databases relating to sources and administrative divisions within the county. Another database which should prove useful when looking for estate records is Landlords of Individual Townland in the County, c.1859 and 1600s.
>
>
> http://www.billmacafee.com/derryancestors/derryancestorscd.htm
>
>
>
> http://www.booksireland.org.uk/
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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