Many peals in the Felstead database have notes attached to them. Typically these are references to pages in The Ringing World. Page references are usually either of the form yy/ppp which consists of the last two digits of the year and the page number or iiii.pppp which is the issue number of The Ringing World followed by the page number. Where a page number is unknown it is either omitted or consists of 0000.
Each peal has a unique identifier called a PealBase identifier. Even 'peals' that have been published in The Ringing World and subsequently found to be false or a hoax or not accepted by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers have PealBase identifiers. The PealBase identifier consists of six characters arranged in two groups of three. Each character can be a digit in the range 0 to 9 or a letter in the range A to F. Please use PealBase identifiers when referring to peals on the Felstead database.
Each 'peal' in the Felstead database has a state. The purpose of the status is to indicate if the 'peal' was okay, erroroneous or unacceptable in some way. Current status values are:
Each tower has a unique identifier called a TowerBase identifier. Several applications such as Dove On-line, John Ketteringham's library of bell recordings and of course TowerBase use TowerBase identifiers as a convenient means of identifying towers. When referring to towers in Felstead it would be helpful to specify the TowerBase identifier as well as the tower name to help remove abiguity and reduce errors.
Canon Felstead frequently omitted the word 'Surprise' from the method detail on his cards. Typically, this didn't matter as he was primarily concerned with how many peals had been rung at any particular tower and not what was actually rung. These method naming errors were largely copied verbatim from the cards on to the database by the volunteers who keyed in the data.
However, computer database technology provides us with the ability to show all the peals of X Surprise Major or all the peals rung on a particular day. It is therefore important that the method names are recorded correctly. Don Morrison has developed software that auto corrects method names where this can be done unambiguously. Where a method has been auto corrected, the comment column is amended accordingly to show what the original name was.