User:JBS66/Sandbox2

Open questions on how this should work:

- Should the list be to all towns with published VR? or all towns with published VR available online? or all towns with published VR with a WR source page? Does it count as "published" if the FHL made a microfilm from original records (so there's a catalog entry, but it's only accessible through the FHL)? Currently I'm deleting towns if they have neither a tan book title (all of which are theoretically available online in combined databases) or an online digitized version that's not just lumped into FamilySearch (which is admittedly not consistent, but we don't have source pages for all the records that used to be in the IGI, and I don't want to create them if they're going to cease to exist as an identifiable source).

- A lot of towns, particularly ones without official "tan books", have several VR entries in the WR source database. Currently they're linked to what appears to be the most comprehensive or the one that has an online version. Some of the extra entries appear to be not very useful FHL entries - i.e. computer printouts, duplicates of published VRs reissued, etc. How to tell the difference and do we treat them all the same? For Boston, which is kind of a special case in having several official commonly used VRs covering different times, I linked to a category for Boston VRs.

- Speaking of categories, have been working with this hierarchy (not so consistent in naming, admittedly):

• Category:Vital records in Massachusetts, United States - category for non-"to 1850" VRs, unless they fit one of the other sub-cats

• Category:Massachusetts town vital records ("Tan Books") - category for the books published early 1900s instead of the above
• Category:Boston, Massachusetts Vital Records
• Category:Record Commissioners Reports - because they cover several towns

Amelia, I think your approach is good and having not used these sources myself, I defer to your judgement. We can always add towns back in to the template later as necessary. I also think we can ignore the not-so-useful FHL entries for now - that's a cleanup project for another time maybe. --Jennifer (JBS66) 08:17, 4 April 2011 (EDT)

I can move this to a template page - would you like a graphic (maybe the state flag) in the top right corner? When we add this to the pages, I can start at Y and work up if you'd like to start at A. If you want to do the first one (adding template and categories) then I can follow your lead. --Jennifer (JBS66) 11:39, 10 April 2011 (EDT)

Sounds good.--Amelia 11:46, 10 April 2011 (EDT)