FreeCEN Administration Tools

FreeCEN Administration Tools—Introduction

This package of software is intended for Administrators and County Co-ordinators of the

Free-CEN project. It has no application or use for transcribers, checkers or users of the FreeCEN data. You are referred to the

Official Site for these aspects of the project and the software required for them.

This software is published Open Source Freeware. You are free to use the programs either in full or part without charge. I would ask however that this notice is included with any extract or onward distribution.

No charge may be made for the use of this code, however there is no objection to including modest extracts (with acknowledgement) in otherwise commercial software.

No warranty is given or implied by the use of the software which you do at your own risk. No compensation can be considered regarding damage to data, computers or any thing else arising as a result of using these programs.

Special thanks to Peter Cox for VALCONV (also the author of FreeCEN WINCC and VALDREV programs).

Contacts

In order to hide email addresses from spam harvesters, the email adresses are hidden by a JavaScript function. If your browser does not support JavaScript then there are two ways to obtain the correct addresses. a) Look at the source code of this page for the mail() function. You should be able to work out the addresses from that or b) email me at rick.parsonswest-penwith.org.uk and I will send you the required address. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

. Sadly, Bob Muchamore died suddenly on 5 Sep 2004, a great loss to the FreeCEN project. Enquiries regarding his software can be made via Rick or through the FreeCEN project.

The Tools

The tools package contains programs which are designed to do a number of tasks to ease the job of the FreeCEN administrator and County Co-ordinator.

FC-TOOLBOX —provides a menu driven interface to the FCTOOLS diagnostic and administration routines.

Full tutorial—This is intended to be printed.

CSVCHECK —is also useful for transcribers. See CSVCHECK Home Page

Warning: The command line interface to the following software is not for the novice. A certain amount of understanding of the running of command line programs, unzipping archives, data safety and the interpretation of messages is expected. In addition, a thorough understanding of the FreeCEN project, the IN-CENS software and the UK Census is assumed.

csv2dat —Receiving transcriptions in spread sheet format. A specialised format for spread sheet data input has been designed to enable transcriptions by people who cannot, for various reasons, use the suplied IN-CENS software for data entry. Further details for transcribers on how to use this will be found on the FreeCEN web site. This program (csv2dat) is provided for Co-ordinators to convert from this format to the standard data file for passing onwards for checking and validation.

dat2csv —Checking of data files received from transcribers. All software has bugs and IN-CENS and its friends are no exceptions (similarly the programs here !). Other factors can also conspire to corrupt the data in some way. The program (dat2csv) is provided to thoroughly check a data file before passing it on to the next stage.

fixparms —In the unfortunate event of a data corruption, the two tools above, used together with additional diagnostics switched on can aid the recovery of a data file with the minimal loss of data. The third program (fixparms) can get a transcriber back on the road if a damaging corruption occurs part way through a transcript.

Post validation using dat2csv and csv2dat. After a transcript has been through all the stages, a final check is valuable and it is possible to generate a view of the file as a whole rather than by individual record. A clean and valid master data file is generated for loading onto the database.

Web page generation. This aspect of dat2csv was written for the

Cornwall Online Census Project to allow the upload of data before the official database became available. It may have applications for other counties.

valconv — is no longer shipped in this suite. Please contact the project if you require it.

In addition there is

reference material about the data file structures which was used during the writing of the software.

revision log containing details of all updates to the software.

information about platforms and compilation.

FreeCEN Administration Tools—Introduction

Copyright

Contacts

The Tools