Is the EPPI website broken?

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pwaldron
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Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by pwaldron » Fri Feb 10, 2012 1:22 pm

The once-excellent EPPI (Enhanced Parliamentary Papers on Ireland 1801 - 1922) website has been favourably mentioned in many threads on the Clare Past forum, e.g.
http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=350

It was formerly at
http://www.eppi.ac.uk/eppi/digbib/home
which, along with the home page at
http://www.eppi.ac.uk/
is now diverting, unhelpfully, to a general page on digitisation activities at the university of Southampton:
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/library/ldu/projects.html

There is a new home page at
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/
and Google searches regularly bring up pages like
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/1768 ... ges/672047
which can be found by Googling
clondrinagh site:eppi.dippam.ac.uk

Using the search form at http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/ to search for
Clondrinagh
unhelpfully says
"No results found. Try widening your search to fulltext using the controls on the left."
Fulltext is already selected by default in the Search Type dropdown menu on the left.

At http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/1768 ... ges/672047 one can read or print the OCR output of the scanning of the relevant page. Like any OCR rendition of an input page organised in columns, it is very hard to make sense of, and it would be lovely to see an image of the orignal page.

There is a link to an image of the page which should be at
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/images/pages3/ ... 000179.jpg
but the image is missing and following the link says:
"404: File Missing
DIPPAM is currently under development and subject to occasional bugs. This error has been reported and will be investigated. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Go Back"

There is also a "Download PDF" link but it just points back to
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/1768 ... ges/672047
sucking the desperate reader into an infinite loop of clicking and reloading.

I've had these problems in both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

The contact details on the EPPI website are very well hidden at
http://www.dippam.ac.uk/static_pages/contact/
where I eventually found an e-mail address to which I could send this error report.

Can anyone help? Have any of those who formerly praised this website used it successfully of late?

Paddy Casey
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by Paddy Casey » Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:09 pm

Hi Paddy,

In my experience the EPPI website has been non-functional or dysfunctional for several months. About a year ago (as far as I remember) they posted something about a removal of the website to other servers but didn't say when things would be running again.

I just fired up http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/ and to my surprise discovered that searches for 'Crusheen' and 'Corrofin' (sic) produced quite a few results and that I was able to view the images and download PDFs. However, the first hit for 'Clare' (Commissioners of Accounts of Ireland: twenty-fifth report) wouldn't show an image ("Forbidden - You don't have permission to access /images/pages3/5764/00000002.jpg on this server. Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) Server at eppi.dippam.ac.uk Port 80") nor was it possible to download a PDF, neither with Firefox nor with Opera.

So it seems that the website is now a kind of Curate's Egg, i.e. good in parts. I only wish - like you, presumably - that they would tell us on their home page what is working and what is not working and when the "not working" is likely to work. One might retort that the "service" is free so I have no right complain but it wouldn't need much effort to put up a simple boilerplate notice while things are under construction.

Paddy C.

A P.S. to this: today I repeated the searches for 'Crusheen' and 'Corrofin' which were successful yesterday. 'Crusheen' returned "Your search showed no results" and 'Corrofin' elicited no answer at all. Maybe it's because it is Saturday or because of the cold weather. The server itself is working. A check with WebSitePulse returned
URL tested: http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents
Test performed from: Seattle, WA
Test performed at: 2012-02-11 15:24:08 (GMT +00:00)
Resolved As: 143.117.157.95
Status: OK
Last edited by Paddy Casey on Tue Feb 14, 2012 9:49 am, edited 2 times in total.

pwaldron
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by pwaldron » Sat Feb 11, 2012 5:29 pm

Just another example of someone deciding that a website that was almost perfect needed an upgrade, and then performing a downgrade!

Paddy Casey
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by Paddy Casey » Tue Feb 14, 2012 9:50 am

Another update 14-Feb-2012: today searches for Corrofin, Corofin, Crusheen, Kilrush yielded masses of documents. I could view the images and download PDFs. So today the site seems to be back up and motoring. Must have taken its tablets last night.

Paddy C.

pwaldron
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by pwaldron » Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:23 pm

The effect of the tablets has worn off! Lots of search results for some terms, but none for Clondrinagh, and the PDFs and images have gone again.

bjg
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by bjg » Sun Mar 25, 2012 11:11 pm

Judging by this http://www.kildarearchsoc.ie/2011/03/on ... ry-at-qub/ it might be useful to email this chap http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofHi ... PeterGray/ because it seems to have been transferred to Belfast. I haven't needed to use EPPI for a while but now I'm not looking forward to returning to it. bjg

pwaldron
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by pwaldron » Sun Jan 20, 2013 9:03 pm

I have noticed Paddy Casey and others posting lots of references to dippam.ac.uk again recently, so decided to investigate whether the behaviour of the site is any more predictable, stable and useful than it was about a year ago.

I decided to repeat the test mentioned above.

A google search for Clondrinagh at dippam.ac.uk currently produces 22 hits:
https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q ... ppam.ac.uk

DIPPAM's own search engine at
http://www.dippam.ac.uk/search
is trying to be very sophisticated. An egg-timer towards the top-right of the screen shows that the search begins as soon as one enters the first character in the search box, and the results confirm that the search is for strings within words, not for whole words. But searching for Clondrinagh says:
"No results found. Please widen your search."

I followed the link from the Google results to
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/2204 ... ges/620639
and an image of a page referring to Clondrinagh appeared, with a two-line menu across the top describing it as `Page 534 of 644' even though the image is of a page numbered 840!

The second line of the menu includes a `Transcript' link which allows one to read the OCR translation of the page displayed.

I followed the `Download PDF' link on the same menu and Adobe Reader opened
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/pdf1/15367-1.pdf
which contained only 100 pages. Using the search function within Adobe Reader to look for the text in the OCR translation failed to find the page I started from (image at
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/images/pages/1 ... 1284729814 ), and a quick skim through the PDF file also suggests that page 840 is not there.

The first line of the menu includes:
Back to Results for 'clondrinagh '
but following this link (which searches just EPPI, not the rest of DIPPAM) says
`No results found. Try widening your search to fulltext using the controls on the left.'
Fulltext is already selected!

I thought briefly that this might be another example of a situation that I discussed offline recently with Paddy Casey and the very helpful staff of Limerick City Library - Google is selective about the PDFs that it chooses to find and index (e.g. it wont lead you to the programme for the upcoming Clare Roots Society conference at
http://clareroots.org/images/CRS-images ... v-2013.pdf ). However, when Google does find a PDF, it puts the PDF through an OCR routine and indexes the OCR output. (See
http://unclutterer.com/2008/11/08/googl ... -all-pdfs/ )

The DIPPAM situation is quite different - Google is finding the OCR output, but DIPPAM is not linking the OCR output to the correct PDF file.

Conclusion: the DIPPAM website is still badly broken.

bjg
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Joined: Thu Mar 22, 2012 5:32 pm

Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by bjg » Sun Jan 20, 2013 9:15 pm

I haven't tested it formally as you did, but my conclusions are the same: the internal search engine is not working properly (and it's now better to go through Google, alas) and I sometimes get only 100 pages of a document. bjg

pwaldron
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1911 census returns for Munster

Post by pwaldron » Mon Feb 04, 2013 10:28 am

I just stumbled across "Census returns for Ireland, 1911, showing area, houses, and population; also the ages, civil or conjugal condition, occupations, birthplaces, religions, and education of the people Province of Munster" which begins at
http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/2196 ... ges/615427
and downloaded the PDF in the hope of figuring out why Parnell Street in Dungarvan, co. Waterford, appears to be missing from the National Archives website.

One would hope on seeing that the PDF is over 20MB in size that it might contain all 1,358 pages of the original document, but alas it contains only the first 100 pages, which is only part of the county Clare returns, which according to the table of contents extend to at least 152 pages.

This information should also be at www.cso.ie which, however, is vying with EPPI for the title of least user-friendly website.

bjg
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by bjg » Mon Feb 04, 2013 10:58 am

Speaking of which (but not of EPPI), have you seen these terms and conditions? http://www.ouririshheritage.org/static.aspx?idtxt=terms bjg

pwaldron
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User-unfriendly websites

Post by pwaldron » Mon Feb 04, 2013 11:12 am

will refrain from copying, downloading, transmitting, reproducing, printing, or exploiting for commercial purpose any material contained within the Website.
Lawyers have a reputation for disliking punctuation, but a couple of parenthetic commas around "for commercial purpose" or moving that clause to the end of the sentence might actually allow people to use the website, if that is its intended purpose.

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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by pwaldron » Tue Apr 02, 2013 10:20 am

This thread has been quiet for a couple of months, possible because EPPI has actually been working as intended, but today it is back to giving messages like:
404: File Missing

DIPPAM is currently under development and subject to occasional bugs. This error has been reported and will be investigated. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Both http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/2103 ... ges/706319 (Page 695 of 826) and http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/2121 ... ges/709532 (Page 575 of 702) are thrown up by Google searches.

There are links from these pages to jpegs which are supposed to be at http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/images/pages3/ ... 000695.jpg and http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/images/pages3/ ... 000575.jpg respectively, but the JPEGs are missing, as are those for other pages in the same reports, resulting in the above error message.

If I'd taken better notes while the site was working, I might be able to figure out whether the links are wrong or the files genuinely gone off-line!

The Download PDF links just point back to the page one is already viewing, which is surely not intended.

The Transcript button does display the OCR output of the desired page, but that is not much use for a complicated table with many columns.

pwaldron
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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by pwaldron » Tue Apr 23, 2013 3:10 pm

EPPI is still very broken.

Appendix (E.) to the First Report of Commissioners for inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland contains detailed information on most if not all parishes in Ireland in a supplement.

There is Document Metadata for this appendix on the EPPI website.

The Document Metadata indicates that the "Title Actual" is
Poor inquiry (Ireland): appendix (e) containing baronial examinations relative to food, cottages and cabins, clothing and furniture, pawnbroking and savings' banks, drinking: and supplement containing answers to questions 13 to 22, circulated by the Commi
"Title Actual" appears to be EPPI-speak for "first 256 characters of the actual title".

The Document Metadata also indicates that the "Pages Sectioned" are "109, 393", whatever that means.

Above the Document Metadata appears "745 pages" and a link to "Download PDF". The latter points to a 239-page 58.2MB PDF version of pages 155-393 of a supplement to Appendix (E.). It begins with a number of Clare parishes.

These pages clearly contain the answers to a questionnaire; it would be nice to see what questions are being answered. Presumably the questions are somewhere between pages 1 and 154 of the supplement.

Page 1 of 745 is actually Page 155 of the Supplement and the first page of the PDF.

Page 239 of 745 is actually Page 393 of the Supplement and the last page of the PDF. Whether or not this is the last page of the original publication is unclear.

Editing the URL seems like one way of turning back from Page 155 to Page 154. But http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/1105 ... ges/253616 is Page 566 of 566 of Royal Commission for inquiring into the condition of the poorer classes in Ireland: Appendix C - Parts I and II.

There is a link from Page 239 of 745 to Next which currently leads to a "404: File Missing" error.

Typing in "240" in a box and clicking "Go to Page" might be expected to lead to the same destination. Instead it leads to Page 1 of 191 of "Royal Commission for inquiring into the condition of the poorer classes in Ireland: supplements to appendices D-F".

I give up! If anyone else can find the missing pages 1-154, please post the link here!!

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Re: Is the EPPI website broken?

Post by Paddy Casey » Sun Feb 05, 2017 8:23 pm

In a post yesterday at http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtop ... f=1&t=6841 Murf flagged that the EPPI website, which I had long given up for dead, is alive and kicking again. I did a couple of searches and found what I was looking for.

Paddy

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