The Transcription Desk is open again! Migration completed successfully.

I am pleased to announce that the Transcribe Bentham Transcription Desk is open for business once more.

You can now access the site at a new web address: http://transcribe-bentham.ucl.ac.uk/

Please update your bookmarks with this new link!

The old site will have a redirect in place to direct users to the new site.

Huge thanks go to Tom Couch and his team at UCL Research IT Services, who have successfully migrated the platform onto a new server at UCL and made various updates and fixes to the Mediawiki.  We also thank Co-Sector, University of London for supporting the platform since 2010.

For our volunteers, the site will hopefully not have changed much.  You can log in and continue transcribing as normal.  All previous edits should have been preserved.

Important changes:

One noticeable difference is that the Javascript viewer is now the default mode of viewing images on the platform.  The Flash viewer is due to become obsolete by 2020 and is already blocked by default on most web browsers.  At the moment, it is still possible to view the manuscripts in the Flash viewer by clicking the options at the bottom left of an image.

Known issues:

Please bear in mind there are a few known issues with the new site.  We are working to fix the following bugs as soon as possible:

• Preview option when transcribing

The option to view a ‘clean’ version of your transcript, without visible TEI tags is currently broken.

• Emails from TB Editor

Any email notifications from TB_Editor are currently marked as being sent by an account called ‘ccea038’.  This is an admin account which is linked to the server.

I would like to thank our volunteers for their continued patience.  Good luck exploring the new site and please get in touch if you have any feedback, issues or questions (transcribe.bentham@ucl.ac.uk).

Now that the site has been migrated, we can start to daydream about further improvements that we hope to make to the platform in the future too!