[Next production] Catherine Louisa Pirkis - Short Fiction

[Robin Whittleton]

As previously discussed, I put together a spreadsheet of her short fiction; taking away Loveday Brooke leaves us with six stories. Of these only one has a transcription; the rest will be transcribed from the OCRed scans.

There is one further story, “Trooping with Crows”, that doesn’t seem to have scans available anywhere (definitely not on Archive.org, Hathi or Google Books) and I can’t find it for sale in any antique book sellers. I did eventually track down that the British Library has a copy which is apparently 125 pages, so probably it’d come in at novella length and fit into this collection. Cost to digitise according to https://www.bl.uk/services/digitisation would be ~£87 so ~$115US. Potentially SE might want to do that?

There aren’t any paintings of Pirkis that I can find, so I’ll pick cover art once I’ve read a few of the stories. She was very pro-dog and there’s at least one story that involves one, so maybe a dog cover will work.

In any case, I’ve made a start with the transcriptions at https://github.com/robinwhittleton/catherine-louisa-pirkis_short-fiction.

-Robin

[Alex Cabal]

OK, sounds good. David will manage with Lukas reviewing.

We can certainly buy scans of those pages though I'm not sure if that
includes OCR'd text. You'd have to prepared to OCR them yourself.

If we do do that, I think it would be good to upload the scans to IA
once we're done.

If you're OK with all of that then send me instructions on what to do to
get to a checkout page and I'll do that.

On 3/29/26 10:16 AM, Robin Whittleton wrote:
> As previously discussed, I put together a spreadsheet <https://
> docs.google.com/spreadsheets/
> d/1kbDlJi7bzkN897o_PrNUaUtGpBaIIsdGKFnz4nuuPN4/> of her short fiction;

> taking away Loveday Brooke leaves us with six stories. Of these only one
> has a transcription; the rest will be transcribed from the OCRed scans.
>
> There is one further story, “Trooping with Crows”, that doesn’t seem to

> have scans available anywhere (definitely not on Archive.org <http://
> Archive.org>, Hathi or Google Books) and I can’t find it for sale in any

> antique book sellers. I did eventually track down that the British

> Library has a copy <https://catalogue.bl.uk/permalink/44BL_MAIN/19agrh4/
> alma990029241420109251> which is apparently 125 pages, so probably it’d

> come in at novella length and fit into this collection. Cost to digitise

> according to https://www.bl.uk/services/digitisation <https://www.bl.uk/
> services/digitisation> would be ~£87 so ~$115US. Potentially SE might

> want to do that?
>
> There aren’t any paintings of Pirkis that I can find, so I’ll pick cover
> art once I’ve read a few of the stories. She was very pro-dog and
> there’s at least one story that involves one, so maybe a dog cover will
> work.
>
> In any case, I’ve made a start with the transcriptions at https://
> github.com/robinwhittleton/catherine-louisa-pirkis_short-fiction

> <https://github.com/robinwhittleton/catherine-louisa-pirkis_short-fiction>.
>
> -Robin
>
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[Robin Whittleton]

British Library offer OCR as part of the digitisation process at £0.01 per image, so another £1.25 which feels worthwhile.

So the process is:

• Click on “our order form” from https://www.bl.uk/services/digitisation
• Fill in your name and address
• Pick “Digitisation”
• In shelfmark enter “12641.cc.26” (I think, that field isn’t labeled on the book’s page, but it makes sense)
• Title is “Trooping with Crows.” [A novel.]
• Author is Pirkis, Catherine Louisa
• Page numbers is (I guess) 1 to 125
• Total page count is 125
• Digitisation service is “Scanning”
• OCR is “Yes”
• Delivery method is “Digital”
• Then agree to UK copyright laws (Pirkis died in 1910 so entered UK PD in 1980)

That’s as far as it goes in the form before the “Submit” button, so … I guess you’re invoiced after? I’ve got a UK bank account so worst case if you need to do some UK-only bank transfer let me know: I can cover it, and we’ll work out how to get SE funds to me later. Or, if you’d rather, we can do that from the start I guess?

The turnaround time is 30 days after receipt of funds, so I’ll do the rest of the book first, then add in “Trooping with Crows” when it arrives. If it somehow turns out to be longer than a novella then I’ll produce it as a separate book.

-Robin

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[David]

Just to confirm shelfmark (the toggle "Summary Holdings" under the record), from JISC:

For those unfamiliar with it, JISC provides a single-entry point search for all academic libraries in the "UK and Ireland". Can be very handy!

FWIW! David / Fife, UK

[Alex Cabal]

OK thanks, I submitted the form and they have to get in contact before
collecting. I'll update this once they begin work.

On 3/30/26 3:06 AM, Robin Whittleton wrote:
> British Library offer OCR as part of the digitisation process at £0.01
> per image, so another £1.25 which feels worthwhile.
>
> So the process is:
>

> * Click on “our order form” from https://www.bl.uk/services/
> digitisation <https://www.bl.uk/services/digitisation>
> * Fill in your name and address
> * Pick “Digitisation”
> * In shelfmark enter “12641.cc.26” (I think, that field isn’t labeled

> on the book’s page, but it makes sense)

> * Title is “Trooping with Crows.” [A novel.]
> * Author is Pirkis, Catherine Louisa
> * Page numbers is (I guess) 1 to 125
> * Total page count is 125
> * Digitisation service is “Scanning”
> * OCR is “Yes”
> * Delivery method is “Digital”
> * Then agree to UK copyright laws (Pirkis died in 1910 so entered UK

> standardebooks/E0143256-6D5B-47D8-9232-C1650AD46A81%40reala.net
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/
> E0143256-6D5B-47D8-9232-C1650AD46A81%40reala.net?
> utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

[C T]

Robin,

If you do need to run your own OCR (they're probably using Abby or something like it), I've got a pretty good set of scripts that I use for running OCR and processing PGDP project uploads. Let me know if the OCR doesn't come out very well, I'd be happy to run an OCR pass over them for you.

I've been using DocTR open-source OCR, and a fine-tuned model that I've been training (and working on a 'labeling' tool) on book scans, which does a decent job differentiating em-dashes and hyphens, as well as curly quotes and diacritics. I've also got a post-processing step that does a decent job with paragraph splits. My goal is to provide this OCR model (and eventually a GUI tool) to PGDP content providers and project managers, but if it can help out SE too, that'd be great.

CT

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[Robin Whittleton]

Good to know, thanks!

-Robin

On 31 Mar 2026, at 04:58, C T <concave...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Robin Whittleton]

I’ve pulled in the individual OCR files of A Bride of a Summer’s Day into a single file, and found that it comes up to 47.7K words. So I’ll remove that from this collection and do it as a separate release directly after.

-Robin

On 29 Mar 2026, at 23:11, 'Alex Cabal' via Standard Ebooks <standar...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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