Wednesday 30 April 2014

Major Glitch in the National Records of Scotland Online Catalogue!

Update 6 May 2014: I am pleased to say the NRS catalogue has now been fixed!


Major Glitch
There is a major glitch in the catalogue of the National Records of Scotland (NRS). I'm not sure when it started but we discovered it on Sunday and reported it on Monday (28 April 2014). It has been reported by the staff to the relevant department so let's hope it gets fixed quickly.


What Happens
We discovered the glitch by searching for the Kelton Kirk Session records. In the top box we put 'Kelton' and in the second we put 'CH' as below:

No results where found. This surprised me. I searched online and found the top level reference for the Kelton kirk session records. Went back to the catalogue with that reference:


Records of Kelton Kirk Session 1715-1903! This should have come up in my initial search.
We had a bit of a rummage and discovered that this is happening a lot, we know that the items not showing up number into the thousands at the least. If you use only the document reference you can find items, but not by searching for words in the titles of items: which is how must of use will use the catalogue!


In the Building
The catalogue works in the building using the NRS intranet, I believe it's just the online version that's not operating correctly. NRS staff are aware of the problem. Meantime, while the NRS work hard to get this fixed, feel free to email me as I'm in the National Records of Scotland a couple of times a week and can do a search for you. I would not recommend using the online catalogue until this glitch is fixed!