What is the difference between the total, distinct and unique records uploaded to FreeBMD?
By way of a practical example: Consider a page of 40 entries, double keyed, with 3 entries transcribed differently by the two transcribers. That gives 80 total records. It also creates 43 distinct records, giving an overcount of 3 records to the total and messing up the stats. We now analyse the alignment of unmatched records, and do an additional count on records which don’t actually match, but which (because of their sequence) are obviously different transcriptions of the same entry, and in the unique records count, only count them once, thus giving 40 unique records. This achieves two things: • More accurate stats • Data that tells us about the degree of mismatch between double keyings (the difference between distinct and unique is the number of mismatches).
