 |
|
 |
|
||
 |
||
|
Enquiries What I cannot help with
The Glossary, Do it yourself, Sources and Sites & Links pages may be of some help. What I can help with
The 211 Squadron website The Site summary page is like a map of the site with comments. Use that page, or the pages menu shown top left on every page, or the Site search page, to find your way around the site. The Glossary, Do it yourself, Sources and Sites & Links pages may also be of some interest to readers with or without a Service background. Citing this website Linking to this site Linking to individual pages Current and future work Although it took some years to be able to add much of the chronological account from official sources, transcripts of surviving 211 Squadron World War II era records are now complete for each year from 1937 to 1941 (if not without loss, error or omission), offering a searchable account of the records of the time. However, having served the site well through various PC, operating system and version upgrades for over a decade, during the recent addition of 1941 records it became clear that the current software is starting to show signs of some strain in handling the table lay-outs that best suit the Operations Record book style. It seems prudent, therefore, to pause to consider options before making any attempt on the much more lengthy sets of Forms 540 and 541 for the years 1943 to 1946. For the immediate future then, work will turn to revisiting photograph collections already on hand and to dealing with any other outstanding material either already in hand or already on offer. Offers of material Contributors need not toil over drafting a narrative. Most of the personal accounts here are my work, researched and written up from the letters, logbooks and so forth, so kindly copied by those interested. Given the amount of information and images already on hand, it will be some time before outstanding or newly offered material can appear. Every piece will continue to be accorded all the care I can give it. The next site update is expected to be in July 2012. Blunders 211 Squadron Survivors Association Over the years I’ve enjoyed very cordial relations with a good many ex-members of 211 Squadron and its Association, or with their families. Deeply appreciated, their interest and assistance have contributed greatly to the richness of this account as it stands today. In October each year, a group of Burma-era members of 177 Squadron and 211 Squadron continue to gather for dinner in London. Internet practice Printing the site Before you print, best to check Page Setup in your browser, and either select Shrink to fit or set page margins to the smallest allowable. You might like to try printing 2-up at least, and both sides if your printer set-up allows it. Through your browser, check your Print/Printer/Properties options. Do a Print Preview first: for some of the site pages, the count of printed pages may be large. At any update, current pages are likely to be revised and new pages added. See the Site Updates page for details. Site navigation In this simplest possible website layout, each page is just one mouse-click away from every other page. The order of material is a sensible compromise between background, chronology, theatre, and individual narrative. So on this site, the Home page is an active page with useful content that briefly introduces the Squadron, the aim of making such a record, and the navigation menu: the long list of page name links that sits at the top of the left hand column on this and every page. To go from one page to another, just pick a link and click. The foot of each page carries another simpler set of links: to the Home page, the Site summary, on to the Next or back to the Previous page, and to the Enquiries, Glossary and Site Search pages. To go to the page you last looked at, use your browser’s Back button. Within-page navigation: Most pages are quite long. Use your keyboard [Home] [End] [Page Up] [Page Down] keys, click-and-drag the scroll bar on the right, or use the mouse scroll-wheel to move up and down each page. The Squadron summary page acts as a narrative site map, introducing the site pages in context, again with live links. Screens and browsers All pages are without frames and free of pop-ups, cookies, animations and sounds. They should work well in any recent browser. For ease of reading, you may wish to set your browser’s viewing options to a sans serif font like Arial, at medium size or smaller. For printing, I choose to reset to Times New Roman. Photographs Image sources are invariably acknowledged on this site. Some photographs came with brief captions or descriptions and these are indicated in the text. In the majority of cases, the captions are my own original work, as are the extended comments. With few exceptions, photographs on this site are reproduced as near as practicable to their original state: monochrome, in their entirety (ie full-frame), near original size and with little or no enhancement. The images come from a variety of sources varying greatly in quality, from original prints and negatives, from 60 year-old half-tone newsprint and photogravure, from copy negatives and prints, from photocopies, from laser and inkjet prints, and from scans of every level of quality. For Web purposes the images are stored as grayscale, in JPEG (.jpg) format, at a notional 72ppi and at or near the highest JPEG “quality” level (ie web quality not archival quality). This way, pages will load with reasonable speed and print at reasonable quality but individual images will neither enlarge or print well. The space limit offered by my Internet service provider is most generous but to deter image theft and to leave plenty of room for growth there are no thumbnail links to higher quality pictures. If you need higher resolution copies of photographs from this site, contact me. Stripping and reposting images from websites like this without asking, without attribution, without a link to the source, and without their carefully developed captions is bad practice. It is slipshod, dishonest and an insult: to the men, to the intelligence of readers, and to future researchers. And yes, I do find and pursue breaches. Patiently, politely, repeatedly and with success. And I do not care how long it takes or how far I have to go. Error 404 Page not found On spam On-line archival preservation Preservation of this site and future access are both assured, for the short term and the long term, with two independent archive sets:
Other Internet archives In the UK for example, the UK Web Archiving Consortium caters selectively for personal sites, sites of private organisations, and the like. Webmasters can nominate their sites for archival copying through the UK Web Archive of the British Library at http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/info/nominate . UK Government sites are covered by The National Archives at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/archivedwebsites.htm . Other national web archive programmes are listed by the NLA PADI page http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/92.html and this Austrian summary of National and State links http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~aola/links/WebArchiving.html. The Internet Archive (also known as the Wayback Machine) offers a hands-off but very imperfect alternative. Although frequent, the stored copies may be quite incomplete (often lacking images and/or pages in whole or in part). More problematically, to find the archived copies of any site, you must first know the right URL or address of the site while it existed. For this site, they were: April 2001 to September 2003: users.bigpond.com/clardo/ Copyright Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland, under the terms and conditions of the Open Government Licence. The 211 Squadron badge is British Crown Copyright/MoD, reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office. Conditions of use Requests for permission to reproduce any of the content in any form should be directed to me in the first instance, at the address above. www.211squadron.org © D Clark & others 1998–2011 |
||
