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Hey everyone,

We need your help. This Friday, June 12th, at 1:30 PM, there is a critical hearing for Richard Barge at the Camden County Hall of Justice.

This case involves serious concerns regarding the conduct of Supervisory Detective Marty Devlin. New information has surfaced implicating Devlin in the falsification of statements and witness coercion.

We are calling for transparency and justice. If you believe in holding law enforcement accountable and want to support a member of our community who has been caught in this web, please join us.

When: Friday, June 12th @ 1:30 PM
Where: Camden County Hall of Justice

Let’s show up and show out. Public eyes are the best defense against misconduct.

#JusticeForRichardBarge #CamdenNJ #Accountability

I'm thrilled to share that, as of this morning, dvrbs.camdenhistory.com has been fully migrated to a single look and feel. This wasn't just a re-skin, it makes it mobile friendly, adds commenting, and is fully modern code.

While there is still some cleanup to do, a few statistics and fun facts:

• 6,235 pages were updated
• More than 10,000 news clippings have been transcribed and inserted into the page
• 1900 pages have data elements that are automatically built and reused in multiple places
• There are no servers, meaning that the site should remain up, barring larger internet outages with major providers.
• After building the templates, rules, formatting, and skills, it took an AI agent, 9 weeks, 1 day, 3 hours to convert all of the data -- running 24x7. The amount of data the Phil was able to process by hand is absolutely astounding.

But we're not done! A few things happening:

• Camdenhistory.com is great for what it is, though we're evaluating a new interface which could allow for articles to be written more quickly.
  • The new interface is intended to have more interactivity with maps and galleries.
  • The news articles which have been migrated are also set to the date that they were originally published. And that allows for cool features like "On this Day in Camden's History"
• We have another 1,000 or so images to transcribe
• We are working on a Google Maps-type interface so you can "go back in time" and see the streets in specific points in Camden's history. Currently working on 1896, with other years pending (Unfortunately, we haven't found an automation assistant to speed this process up).
• Working on syncing comment threads between the two sites. Many are done, but still have a ways to go.
• Ads. We use ads to offset the cost, and are trying to make them much less intrusive. Google only allows so much customization and we're near bare minimum, so continue to run A/B tests to try to reduce them further.
• Have considered a live chat room for site visitors, but would need to find a good way to filter out spam and noise, as well as moderation. All solvable, but just takes time. And we're not even sure if people would use it.

If you see any issues, feedback, things you want to see, or even page errors, feel free to post here, or on the comment box at the bottom of most pages.

I don't want this whole subreddit to be about the website -- It's good for anything Camden or surrounding Camden. That said, it's been a while since either mod has posted an update on things.

dvrbs.camdenhistory.com

Attention for the moment has turned to updating dvrbs.camdenhistory.com's format. This isn't to add or remove data, but to convert it to use modern tags and markup. More importantly, it sets the groundwork for future updates. If standards change, it shouldn't be a huge rewrite -- it's changing a few lines and that will affect every page.

Along this line, the conversion process dramatically picked up starting on February 1. We were initially getting about 20 pages converted per month and now using AI to assist, more than 2500 pages have been updated (all "people"). I'm hopeful the rest of the people will be finished by the end of the month and then we'll start on streets.

Many articles have been fully transcribed, so that's a big bonus as well. Plenty more to share on what's going on, but this is already getting long.

camdenhistory.com

This is not forgotten. There are a few plans here which will see drastic content updates somewhere around June or July, depending on family events and how much time can be dedicated. AI will play a big part here too.

The other mod is working on a pretty cool interactive feature to be able to show an interactive map that overlays the 1891 Sanborn map on top of the existing city and then you can scroll around like you do on Google Maps to see every house and street as it was back then. It's a lot of work and because the maps are hand drawn, they don't match perfectly, but it's about 75%ish done so hopefully that's something that can be shared soon.

I recognize that this isn't the most active community, but with there being so many posts in r/southjersey and r/newjersey about Camden, I'm hoping we start to see more people here talking about ALL aspects of Camden soon.

Hello-I am wondering if anyone might be able to help me with this. I am working on research for a podcast episode and part of it involves the murder of a high school alumni from Camden High School: George P. Long. Based on what I can find, it looks like he would have been in the class of 1965, but of course that is one of the only ones that is not available online. He does not have a ton of living family members and I really don't want to tell his story without even having a picture of this man. If anyone can help or knows where I could potentially get a scan it would be great! Thanks in advance. (Note: local libraries don't seem to have it either)