ORA - Online Repository Assistant
John Cardinal
I am pleased to announce ORA, the Online Repository Assistant.
ORA combines a web browser extension with a Windows program to help you extract data from your favorite online repositories and capture the information in your genealogy program. ORA has several features that will save time, reduce errors, and increase the consistency of your data entry.
Currently, ORA supports these online repositories: Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, Find a Grave, General Register Office (UK), Newspapers.com, and Nova Scotia Genealogy. More will be added in the coming weeks.
The Record Status feature helps you keep track of which records you have reviewed so you do not waste time reviewing a record that you have already processed or rejected. If you mark a record Pending or Questionable, ORA will add it to a list so you can easily return to it later.
There are several Clipboard-oriented features that simplify copying data to the clipboard. If you've ever pasted data only to discover it includes unwanted HTML formatting, newlines, or punctuation, or found it hard to select the text because of the way it is presented on the repository page, you'll love how ORA simplifies this essential process.
At the heart of ORA is a data extraction engine that finds the data on a repository page and gathers it into the ORA Control Panel. Those fields can be copied to the clipboard, as described above. With ORA's powerful Text Templates facility, you can combine field values into your preferred source or citation format and use the template output with ORA's Clipboard feature. ORA's Text Templates are similar to the sentence and citation templates found in RootsMagic, Family Historian, TMG, and other programs, but with special features for transforming fields as they are inserted into the output of the template.
Going further, you can use ORA's Auto Type feature where you define templates to send keystrokes and other control sequences to your genealogy program to do automated data entry!
For more information about ORA, see the Introduction slideshow. It includes several videos that show ORA in action.
ORA has its own discussion list. Please join if you want to discuss ORA with current and future users.