A couple of months ago I realised my big, searchable database of Tasmanian Post Office Directories was missing the volume from 1920. It took a bit of work to add it in, as described in this post. Unfortunately, I’d barely finished when I realised that a number of other years were also missing! Argh! The good news is that I’ve been steadily working through these missing volumes, adding one a week, and now I’m finally, finally finished!

The new volumes are:

• 1920
• 1933-34
• 1941-42
• 1942-43
• 1943-44
• 1945-46

In total there are now 54 volumes from 1890 to 1948. Every line of every volume has been OCRd and indexed, so you can run fulltext searches across all 54 volumes to find matching entries. The fulltext search also supports advanced operators like wildcards and booleans.

As I mentioned in relation to 1920, while these volumes can be downloaded as PDFs from Libraries Tasmania, they don’t contain any OCRd text – they’re not searchable (despite what Libraries Tasmania says here). The quality of the scans is also quite variable – tight bindings cut off text, pages are skewed, and lighting is inconsistent. This means that the OCR processing is far from perfect. There will be names missing from the search index as a result of this. However, because you can search across all volumes at once, the database makes it easier to find people, as you can pick them up in one year and follow them through subsequent volumes, filling in any gaps.

It would be great if Libraries Tasmania would add a link to the database from their Directories and almanacs page. I’ve sent a couple of emails but haven’t received a reply. It seems odd that they’d link to commercial offerings like FindMyPast, but not to the free, community-developed version!