Digitisation of the 1921 Census of England and Wales Completed
We’re delighted to announce the completion of the digitisation of the 1921 Census of England and Wales. Max Communications was contracted by Find My Past to carry out image capture, processing and quality assurance for this project. To give an idea of the sheer size of this undertaking we’ve included some statistics below:
- The census is stored in 28,000 volumes containing between 300 to 600 household schedules.
- These volumes occupied 1.6km of storage shelving.
- If every schedule were laid in a line, they would stretch across 4,675 kilometres or nearly 3000 miles, similar to the distance between London and Boston.
- 7,159 combined working days (53,692 combined hours) were spent on capture and QA.
- Over 20,000,000 images (28,152 volumes) were captured in total.
- Average capture speed was 208,204 images per week working out at 41,641 images per working day.
- Peak capture speeds were 365,100 images captured, processed and QA’d in a week.
- The final digitised images required approximately 1.4 petabytes of storage.
Work for the digitisation of the 1921 census was carried out between February 2019 and September 2021 by a Max Communications team working at the Office for National Statistics at Titchfield in Hampshire and is the latest in a growing list of very large scale digitisation projects which we’ve successfully completed.
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