WilmaM wrote:Well done
At last common sense has won the day - Thank you - User Group
We dae wir best, ken
The minutes are very much written in civil servese, and it needs to be understood and appreciated that it's a bit like the picture of the swan floating along serenely on the surface, but underneath there's a heckuva lot of paddling going on.
The full flavour of a lot of the detailed discussion over a 2 hour long or more meeting just doesn't come through in the minutes, - for example, at the last meeting GROS/SoL got an absolute roasting in terms of yet further delays in the availability of the remaining censuses.
In between meetings there are regular email exchanges between UG members and GROS/SoL, individual and group when appropriate, - for instance, just recently there have been some quite acerbic emails on the subject of advice to SP members seeking the identity of institutions in the censuses available online
, but I believe that little or no purpose would be served by such emails being sent in the full public gaze of every SP member. In fact, I very strongly believe that such an approach would be totally counter-productive.
There's been a couple of occasions since the launch of the User Group when I've felt like throwing in the towel, but have always come round to the point of view that it's better to take the aggro and continue, along with my fellow UG members, to be the piece of grit in the oyster that leads to the occasional production of a pearl
Part of the aggro is not being fully free to disclose info that is given to UG members in confidence by GROS and/or SoL (ScotlandonLine, the operator of SP). Along with that goes uninformed, and quite personally nasty criticism of the UG by a small number of folk out there, some of whom don't even pay UK income tax, but still free to write to the Registrar General hissel, as well as the Scottish Executive minister responsible for GROS, on a regular basis. That such repeated contacts and misguided "campaigns" are totally counter productive seems to be totally impossible to get these puir folk to comprehend
It's a fine balance at times to judge between what is best for the future of SP, and what could be best in the immediate present for members to understand why various things are and aren't happening. For instance, UG members knew of the upgrades instituted earlier this week at the last UG meeting, but weren't fully sure of the timescale, and were active in testing these various upgrades last week, but still, at that point, weren't fully informed in terms of the date for their implementation.
I now have a pretty good idea of when the 1861 census index and images will come on line at SP, but, no how, no way, am I going to go public with a prediction for 1861, never mind 1851 and 1841.
Been there, lost the T-shirt, still bear the still painful scars 8-[
David
Plus the addition of the census header. 
