Nyshporka 0.40: scans from the websites of eight archives, search by years and archive, four times less disk space

In this release Nyshporka reaches more cases: scans from the own websites of eight regional archives, seven new archives in ARCHIUM, and all parts of a case scattered across different FamilySearch groups. Search can now be narrowed by years and archive, and what has been read takes four times less space on disk. Two of these changes were suggested by Supriaha participants.

Scans from regional archive websites

Some digitised cases are posted by archives not in ARCHIUM but on their own websites, in sections such as "Metryka" or "Digitised documents". Until now such cases had to be found and downloaded by hand. Now Nyshporka sees eight such websites:

A case can be found by title or shelfmark and downloaded the same way as from ARCHIUM. Tell the assistant: "find the case of fond 484 on the Mykolaiv Archive website", or use the commands:

nysh crawl site-damo — collect the list of the site's cases once

nysh find <слово> --source site-damo — search in it

nysh get site-damo <фонд>/<опис>/<справа> — download a case

Good to know:

• The list of cases is a snapshot of the website on the day you collected it. Archives add to their websites every month, so "not found" means "was not on the website that day", not "the case is not digitised".
• The Odesa archive gives only the shelfmark without a title, so search there by shelfmark.
• A case posted in parts (part 1…part 11) is stored as one case with several files.

A case from an archive website — in the fond register

If you keep a fond register, Nyshporka now knows which of its cases are on the archive's website. Such a case is no longer marked "order" but "take yourself", with the mark "S", and is taken from the website. Tell the assistant: "add to the fond register the cases from the archive website".

Seven more archives in ARCHIUM

TsDAVO, TsDAHOU, TsDAMLM, and the Kyiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv and Poltava archives are now fully connected. Their fonds can be browsed, and a case can be searched for by title, not only taken by an exact link.

All parts of a case on FamilySearch

Sometimes one case is split across several FamilySearch groups: volume I in one, volume II in another. Until now Nyshporka knew only the first group, so you might not see the second part of the case at all. This happened, for example, with case 631-3-5 of the Ivano-Frankivsk Archive: the years 1866–1900 are in one group, and 1901–1931 in another.

Now the fond register knows all groups of a case, the case card shows each one with a link, and before downloading Nyshporka warns that the case has to be taken from several places. There are many such cases: in the TsDIAK fond 127 alone there are 2,164.

Search by years and archive

This change was suggested by a Supriaha participant.

"Search for a surname in the Kharkiv Archive between 1795 and 1858" is now a single command:

nysh text find <прізвище> --year 1795..1858 --archive ДАХО

Or tell the assistant: "search for Ivanenko in the cases of the Kharkiv Archive of 1795–1858".

• Years are taken from the case description. A case is included if its years at least partly fall within your range.
• A case whose years are not given in the description does not drop out of the search, and the answer says how many such cases there are. If there are many, "not found" does not yet mean that the surname is absent in those years.
• If no case that has been read fits the condition, Nyshporka will say so instead of showing an empty result.
• When more than 60 cases fit the condition, the search runs in a fast mode, without the most thorough checks in each case, and warns about it. For a full search, narrow the years or take a single fond.

Four times less disk space

This change was suggested by a Supriaha participant.

Next to the text of a case that has been read, Nyshporka stores where on the scan each line stands, so that it can show a crop of it. There is a lot of this data: in our workspace it took 75.9 GB. Now it is stored compressed, and the accuracy of the crops stays the same to the pixel. Newly read material is compressed at once, and material already read is compressed by the command:

nysh disk compact — count how much space will be freed

nysh disk compact --apply — compress

In our workspace 75.9 GB shrank to 16.8 GB in about an hour and a half. It can be interrupted at any time: running it again finishes the rest, and the command skips cases that are being read right now.

If two computers work with one workspace, first update both, and only then compress. Versions before 0.40 do not see compressed data, and the line crops will disappear on the old computer.

Cases are still handed over to Supriaha in the usual form, so participants with older versions accept them unchanged.

Ridni.org is no longer used

The Ridni.org book catalogue has not been responding since the end of October, so Nyshporka no longer contacts it. Where a village's registers are kept is now suggested by an index built from the same primary sources: the Consolidated Catalogue of Parish Registers and archive inventories. It works without the internet.

nysh parish metrics "<село>, <повіт>"

Or tell the assistant: "where are the registers of the village of Ivanivka, Olhopil district?"

How to update

nysh update, then nysh migrate. Or a new nyshporka-setup.exe over the old one.