Jonathan Ainsworth, Systems Team Officer, Leeds University “St Georges Field” is a large green space within the campus of the University of Leeds. For over a hundred years up to the 1960s it was operated as a cemetery and over 97,000 people were buried there. As part of our “Medical Collections Project” (funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Resources Award) the University Library has recently digitised the full set of burial registers using its in-house digitisation studio. All 97,000+ individual records were transcribed by an outside agency, and the resulting data was imported into EMu. The full registers are available online as part of the Special Collections public catalogue. The transcribed data held in EMu is fully and freely available to be searched and browsed using a specially-created online catalogue, which also allows access to the digitised registers.

1. Digitising the dead centre of the
University: the Leeds General
Cemetery Burial Registers
Jonathan Ainsworth

2. Wellcome Research Resources Grant
• PI- Stella Butler; CI Joanne Fitton, Head of Special Collections;
Project archivist Louise Piffero, Collections assistant Riza Hussani
• To make valuable archival collections better known through creation of
online catalogues searchable at https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-
collections
• To digitise collections with high research potential
• To preserve collections through better storage and, where appropriate,
remedial treatments

3. Medicine and health in Leeds 1760-1999
Ref No: MS 628: Case Notebooks, vols 2-6

4. 20th century – Nursing and General Infirmary
MS 1656: Nurses
Training Registers
Kathleen Annie Raven
(1910-1999)Leslie Pyrah (1899-1995)

5. St George’s Field
Map data
©2017
Google

6. Leeds General Cemetery Company
• Founded 1833 as joint stock company
• Acquired by Leeds University in 1956
• Closed to burials 1969
• Between 1833 and 1969 there were 93,669 burials recorded in 25
volumes of burial registers
• Company’s administrative records also held in collection

7. Image ref: Photograph of the Leeds General Cemetery, 1962 [MS 421/6/1/5]
The Leeds
General
Cemetery
Company
Archive
(MS 421)

8. Burial register digitisation
• Digitisation funded by the University as part of the project
• Library’s Digitisation Studio created high-resolution images
• Integrated ingestion process: metadata in EMu, images in
the Digital Asset Management System
• Lower-resolution versions accessible from public catalogue

10. Improving access using transcription
• Registers contain key information: date of death, cause,
occupation
• Of interest to medical, social and family historians
• Transcription by external agency took 3 months

11. Challenges of transcription
• Cost of transcription: not all fields transcribed
• Readability highly variable
• Data quality: original and transcribed had issues

12. Data management
• Spreadsheet template provided to external agency
• Returned data was checked and some corrections made
• Data imported into EMu – using existing fields
• Some data manipulation – e.g. decimal version of age

13. Using EMu
• Single Point of Truth for all Special Collections data
• Archivists are using their standard system
• Cross-referencing of records curates detailed relationships
• Available to the public website via EMu API using existing
system (used for public catalogue)

14. Burial Register Index

21. Notable individuals
• John Atkinson Grimshaw
(6 September 1836 – 13
October 1893) artist
• Pablo Fanque (1796-
1871) , circus proprietor
• Charles Hull VC (24 July
1890 – 21 February 1953)

22. Registers in use
• Already used in University teaching (School of Medicine)
• Key resource in AHRC project ‘Living and dying’ (School of
History)
• >30,000 visits since November.
Including overseas, mainly
N America, Australia/New Zealand

23. Opening Up St George’s Field:
Green space on University campus

24. Opening up St George’s Field: project elements
• Interpretation telling the story of
St George’s Field and the
people who rest here
• A war graves memorial
exploring the sacrifice and
contribution made by those who
died
• Public events including drama
and music exploring the
heritage of the area

25. Lessons learned
• Think carefully about data usage to determine what gets
transcribed
• Data quality – needs more work even if done externally
• Important to have data in one system – easier to maintain,
allows open-ended usage
• Don’t overbuild the public interface