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The move of Dove’s Guide to its new home is complete!
Wednesday 9 December 2020 Readers will know that there is a project taking place to transfer the information on this website from a legacy system sitting in the house of the Dove Master, John Baldwin, to a new more robust database that can be accessed online and maintained under the direction of the Dove Stewards. In August we were able to announce the transfer of the tower level data and a new design that can support the separation of different sets of bells in a tower into collections. We are now delighted to announce the completion of the second major part of this project concerning the transfer of information on the constituent bells. This aspect of Dove’s Guide has been termed the “prototype National Bell Register” or pNBR. Dove is now showing details of 7,149 rings of bells and 47,221 constituent bells, although the Dove Master and Stewards have been collecting additional information on chimes and other towers in the background for future publication, all of which has been transferred over to the new database. No longer will Dove be listing updates to towers and bells separately as they are now part of the same system. There are two remaining transitions to take place into the new systems, namely details on bell frames and bell restoration projects. We have taken both these sets of data off the old system and the info will continue to be displayed on the website. We will not be publishing changes to bell frames until the development of this part of the new database is completed in early 2021. We will however publish updates to bell restoration projects using an interim system. We continue to be grateful for the many updates we receive from the bell hanging companies and other individuals on the progress of projects. This milestone is therefore significant! The consequence of this release and the plans for the next two stages means that we are no longer reliant on the use of or need to update the Dove Master’s legacy equipment, although additional unpublished data continues to be extracted from it for future publication. After about 30 years, it means that John Baldwin is finally able to pass on the responsibility of physically updating information on bells, frames and projects (47,221 bells is a lot of bells, not to mention those that are recorded but not yet published!). There will be more to say about John’s contribution in future communications. Once again, I would like to acknowledge the considerable amount of work that has gone into this phase of Dove development. Richard Smith has been responsible for the technical development and has been on hand to respond to testing and fixing bugs as they arise. Tim Jackson has spent hours meticulously comparing the output of the new system with the old system to ensure that everything has been transferred as it should, as well as offering wise counsel throughout. My own contribution has been one of management, user testing, and conceptualisation. Dickon Love, Dove Lead |
