A recent e-mail conversation stimulated me to look at how the way the HRS data are evolving, and in particular the significance of the photographic contribution. Stuart (Ball) was already looking at this for other purposes and produced the attached comparative graph. This got me very worried because it looked as though the dataset was taking a very serious shift away from machine-readable inputs towards direct extraction from the web. So, I looked at this and I think I have found out what is going on - 17 of our most productive recorders have not submitted records this year (several for some years). A small job is for me to chase them in the next few days so that we will hopefully be reasonably up to date. (a bigger job is then for Stuart to put data through Record Cleaner and upload it into the dataset. In the course at looking at when people had last contributed I took a look at the numbers of records contributed since 2000 (a total of 314,722 records) and how this was made up. In line with previous analysis, just over 20 recorders (22) have contributed 50% of the data and just 70 have contributed 80% of the data. What is perhaps most interesting is to see how the dynamics are changing and the large number of relatively recent recorders in the 1-9 year bracket (second graph). This gives me huge hope because when I last did this exercise three or four years ago it seemed as though we were still heavily dependent upon the old guard, many of whom had been contributing since the 1970s. That situation is clearly changing and it is really encouraging to see new recorders emerging in numbers. Obviously the absolute numbers will change as the remaining data comes in, but I think that the message is pretty positive. Well done everybody and many thanks for all contributions - they all help.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 22:27:51 +0000