Bringing Horsham’s History online

An important part of every city, town or village surely must be to have a definitive history written about it, writes online editor Steve Payne.

We are lucky in Horsham. Former curator Jeremy Knight spent many, many hours compiling a detailed history in a number of volumes.

Back in 2006 the first volume was pulled together and published.

Several copies were sold and you can borrow the book from the town’s library, but good luck if you are hoping to buy one today!

Years later the situation has changed dramatically.

The cost of printing has risen astronomically thanks to the prices for ink and paper skyrocketing, so reprinting is no longer an option.

However, it seemed a waste of all that effort by Jeremy (and indeed those who helped with this mammoth project) to simply let his history fade away.

So the Friends of Horsham Museum & Art Gallery were asked to help by putting his work on their website.

We are delighted to say that the first volume is now live and accessible and the rest of the volumes will be added in the coming months.

However, there have been problems to overcome. For a start, the Friends’ website is a fairly basic model. As a charity we have to be careful with finances and the one we plumped for is perfectly adequate for providing news and information about us and the Museum.

It’s not designed to host five sizeable books. There is software specifically designed to do just that (plugins) but that would mean upgrading the website significantly, with, of course, added costs.

We also had to leave out the general illustrations and only include those that are vital. We have a limited amount of media space and pictures are quite bulky (more space comes at a price).

We are pleased with the result, though. Each volume will be on a separate web page but these days tablets and laptops happily deal with opening large amounts of data.

The books can be viewed by the casual reader, but the aim is to provide an important research tool.

If you want to know about a certain subject then the advice is to use the normal search tools (eg Ctrl F in Windows) to track down what you’re looking for.

To make it an easier reading experience, we have separated the 800 plus footnotes on to another page.

So, after several man hours copying and pasting, checking formats, trying to work out why some tables worked and others didn’t (!) we have what we think is a workable solution.

There might be tweaks in the coming weeks (some spacing could be adjusted and we’d love to link every footnote to its corresponding number in the volume).

But at some stage you have to publish and take a breather. We hope this first volume is of use and worthy of its book version!

To see the book click here.