It seems every Czech archives decided to have its own web application / registry browser. After Pilsen regional archives created PortaFontium website together with Bavarian archives and Austrian St. Pölten archives was included under Matricula-online system, the last one which was still staying in ActaPublica website together with Brno land archives was Prague regional archives. Well, it's not true anymore.
State Regional Archives in Prague created new web application called eBadatelna (eStudy) which is available here: http://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/. And you know what's wonderful? It's available in English!
Index page of new eBadatelna - in English
The system itself is quite similar to the ActaPublica system, but there are few changes which are great for users. First of all and visible on index page - translation of ActaPublica links. Have you already found your ancestors in the old system and you saved the link to the record? No problem, just copy and paste the link to that page and the website will take you to the proper page in the new system.
Search system is similar to the old one in ActaPublica - you begin to type the name of village or town and the drop-down menu appears where you can choose the proper municipality.
Search in new system.
The list of registries is very similar to that one in ActaPublica. The main difference is listing of all the villages contained in the registry directly in the search result. Again - those registries are available which have number of scans larger than 0. But even those where 0 is written are clickable. Every parish book is opened in new window and those which have no scas are marked with "Register not digitized" line.
Search results in new system.
Top line of the browsing window shows description of the parish book (type and time span) as well as possibility to check the book description - it will just switch the window, you can switch back to scans by clicking on Scans view. This is definitely an advantage because you can get to parish book description and details without closing it.
Top navigation line.
Navigation throu the system is easy, based on the navigation system from ActaPublica. There is one change which took me a while to get used to - navigation bar is placed on the bottom of the page instead of the top in ActaPublica. But huge advantage - mouse scroll wheel works to zoom in and out in new system. :)
Navigation bar of eBadatelna system.
Last, but definitely not least thing I want to mention is possibility to download an image from the parish book. Finally! This was huge disadvantage of ActaPublica website because you had to use other options to be able to save the record in which you were interested. Just click on Download button in the navigation line.
Good luck in your research!
Download image button in new system.
Good luck in your research!
Thank you for the new web application explanation. I hope it will get a forum where we can ask other wonderful researchers for translations. Wow, didn't know it is possible to download an image.......I'll be busy for a while ;-)
ReplyDeleteDownload feature is great and I really appreciate the archives decided to allow genealogists to save the picture without any obstacles. :)
DeleteI like the web site and think it's set up very nicely. The only aggravation is that the whole site is so SLOW. Not just the image pages--even the ones with just text. Hopefully that changes--I have a lot of people to look up in there! )
ReplyDeleteYes, the slowness is a problem, but it should be better as the application improves. The company which created it is still working on the system so it should be better and better every day. :)
DeleteThank you, Blanko, for this post. As always, this is excellent information for beginners like myself.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the download feature of any page is a wonder addition. It always takes me a while to download the image of a record from sites such as actapublica. I imagine that one day a searcher will be able to download an entire parish book as a 300 page .pdf file, and will be able to search it via some advanced tool, instead of doing it one page at a time.
A side note: I don’t know if it has to do with my computer or mouse or my set up, but the zoom feature using the mouse wheel in actapublica works in the opposite direction than in ebadatelna.