1. The Inquiry Report is published by the Inquiry in a printed version and on the Inquiry website.
The printed version of the Report
2. The printed version consists of a 'boxed set' with two volumes of text and two volumes of image supplement. It includes a DVD containing the text of the Report and an electronic folder of relevant visual images.
The Report on the Inquiry website1
3. The text of the Report is accessed by clicking on the 'Report' tab on the 'Home' page. The image supplement has not been reproduced as a separate supplement but each image can be accessed (see below).
References in the Report
4. Those with a rank relating to their employment (e.g. police officers) are introduced and identified with that rank the first time they appear in the text. Thereafter they are referred to as Mr, Mrs or Ms. To avoid confusion as to their roles at the time of the events, lawyers subsequently appointed as Sheriffs are not called Sheriff but their appointments are noted in footnotes. In accordance with historical convention, where relevant 'he' is used to include all genders. The term used for the prosecution is generally "the Crown", except in references to criminal cases where, in accordance with convention, the phrase "Her Majesty's Advocate" (HMA) is used instead e.g. Her Majesty's Advocate v McKie.
5. A list of witnesses is included in the appendices. The appendix notes the witness's role, Inquiry witness statement reference number, date of oral evidence (if any) and legal representative. Individuals are usually introduced, briefly, the first time they are mentioned in the Report. Inquiry witness statements generally begin with an account of the individual's career history.
6. The Report has extensive footnotes, most of which are references to evidence to the Inquiry in the form of documents or oral evidence at Inquiry hearings.
Transcripts of Inquiry hearings
7. References in the Report to oral evidence at the hearings contain the name of the witness, the date of this evidence in 2009 and the page in that day's LiveNote® transcript. When accessing a transcript on the Inquiry website it is therefore the "download LiveNote transcript" tab that should be used.
Documents
8. Material gathered as evidence or produced in the course of the Inquiry has an Inquiry reference code of two letters followed by four numbers, e.g. XY_1234. Documents coded in this way are available to view on the Inquiry website. When using the website's search tools, the underscore _ must be included in the reference code. Web users may find that general search engines also give direct access to Inquiry documents.
Text documents
9. Where the reference in the Report is to an Inquiry witness statement this is stated but, apart from this, footnotes generally mention only the Inquiry reference code not a description of the document.
10. Copyright material from journals, books and reports has not been referenced with an Inquiry reference code or reproduced on the Inquiry website. Citations of these include author name, title of publication, publisher name and date of publication so that readers can obtain a copy for example from a library or the original publisher. Where material is available on-line, the URL has been supplied wherever possible.
Images
11. The evidence included many fingerprint images. Most of these are referenced in the same way as text documents i.e. there is a footnote reference giving the Inquiry reference code, and relevant images are included in the image supplement.
12. Some images have a suffix 'h' and a few have a suffix 'A', because of the arrangements the Inquiry made to have the best possible digitised images of fingerprint evidence in use at the hearings.
13. Original images were scanned at high resolution (600 dots per inch (dpi) rather than the standard 300dpi) in TIFF format, to optimise the amount of detail preserved when saved electronically. References in transcripts and the Report that include the suffix 'h' indicate that the image was scanned at high resolution.
14. Images with the suffix 'A' are charted enlargements created in Phase 1 of the comparative exercise. The chartings which Phase 1 contributors prepared of Y7 and the print for comparison, and of QI2 Ross and the print for comparison, were scanned at high resolution and electronically resized to allow for the chartings from two contributors to be displayed simultaneously at the hearings. These digital images were named by adding a suffix 'A' to the Inquiry reference code and are referred to with the suffix in transcripts and in the Report.
15. Computer software was available during the hearings so that witnesses could mark up images displayed on screen in order to pin-point precisely the characteristic that was being referred to or to illustrate the interpretation of detail in a mark or print. These images were captured and allocated a special Inquiry reference code at the time, which was then included at that point in the hearing transcript. The Inquiry reference for the material which was annotated is seen within the image and the Inquiry reference code includes the date of the hearing and the number of such 'captured images' already created that day. For example, FI_2110.11 is a 'captured image' (based on EA_0029) which was created during the hearing on 21 October 2009 and was the eleventh 'captured image' that day.
16. A few still photographs were taken during the hearings and the Inquiry reference code for these images also includes the date of the hearing. For example FI_1106-A was the first still photograph taken at the hearing on 11 June 2009.
Viewing images
17. There are a number of options for viewing images referred to in the Report:
18. Because some of the high resolution scans (at over 220MB) are above the upper limit that can be reproduced for download, 'h' images are not on the Inquiry website but are on the DVD.
Viewing other evidence
19. Other evidence referred to in the Report can be seen on the Inquiry's website, by following the instructions on using the 'Search' function or by clicking on the "Hearings and Evidence" tab on the Inquiry Home page. This opens a page from which the full evidence archive, dedicated witness pages and transcripts of the hearings can be accessed.
20. The website also contains the transcripts of the two preliminary hearings, witness statements and other documentary evidence received throughout the Inquiry process which may not be mentioned in the Report, as well as background information and procedural details.
National Records of Scotland
21. At the end of the Inquiry the Inquiry Record transfers to the National Records of Scotland.