Can You Help End Our Publishing Confusion?

We have several books in the process of being written, at various stages of completion, but there the story ends. We have become bogged down trying to find the most suitable method for getting these books out to the public and have become very confused with "Print on Demand" and ISBN numbers.

Oatlands is incredibly badly served in terms of its published history and we want to change that situation but we simply don't know the best method of achieving it.

If you are a publisher or printer, or if you have experience of 'self publishing' methods, please contact us using this form...

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Can You Help With Graphics or Artwork?

All of the graphics for this website were prepared using Paintshop Pro 8 by someone who had the software but, by their own admission, is not graphically gifted nor particularly adept at using the software. We have a requirement to create a 'bird's-eye view' of the village showing things of historical interest, but with all the other detail missing, so that we can create a "Guide Map to Oatlands History", we sometimes need drawings of buildings from photographs - but we just don't have the skills to do any of these.
If you have any abilities that could assist us, please contact us using this form...

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Can You Help With Our Printing Needs?

Like any group, we have our printed materials. For leaflets, flyers, cards and things luke that, we could use one of the web-based printing houses because they are cheap, fast and the quality is 'adequate for purpose.

We do occasionally have a requirement for printed materials that cannot be serviced easily by this method though - large size map printing (b/w and colour), laminating, saddle-stitched booklets and books, things like that. We can probably get everything to a 'print-ready' status and supply the digital files in the required format but we will probably require a bit of 'hand-holding' to achieve it and we know nothing about paper types, allowing for 'margin creep' or any of those things.

If you are a printer or know someone who can help us, please contact us using this form...

Can You Help With Our Database?

We know what we want, we have the data, we know how it needs to be presented - what we lack is the ability to create a working relational database.

Some databases will be 'internal' and used only within the group, some need to be searchable from this website, some need to be 'stand-alone' as very few people have MS-Access or anything similar on their home computer (and we have no experience with anything other than MS-Windows).

Collecting the data and collating it is one thing, being able to search it and present it is a whole different thing and most of our data (e.g. census transcriptions) currently exists within MS-Excel spreadsheets because we are familiar with them.

While it would be nice to have a 'search every record-set' type of database at some time in the future, we are not at that stage yet because we just don't know all possible the data-fields - for now, it would be nice to simply speed-up data retrieval on a set-by-set basis.

If you are an expert, or even very capable, with databases, please contact us using this form...

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