TransylvanianDutch

This is a guest post by Jose “Ricky” Padilla, a HACU intern working with NDIIPP.

More and more cultural heritage organizations are inviting their users to tag collection items to help aggregate, sort and filter collection items. If we could better understand how and why users tag and what they’re tagging we can better understand how to invite their participation. For this installment of the Insights series I interview Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and a research fellow at the Web Science Research Initiative about her ongoing studies of how users tag art objects.

Ricky: Could you tell us about your work and research on tagging behaviors?

Jennifer: I have studied tagging in a few ways. With respect to images of artworks, we have run two major studies. One looks at the types of tags people use. The other compares and contrasts tags generated by people in different cultures.

In the project on tag types, we used a variation of the categorization matrix developed by Panofsky and Shatford. This groups tags by whether they are about things (including people), events, or places and also by whether they are general (like “dog”), specific (like “Rin Tin Tin”), or abstract (like “happiness”). We also included a category for tags about visual features like color and shape.  We found that people tended to use general terms to describe people and things most commonly. However, when they are tagging abstract works of art, they are much more likely to use tags about visual elements.

My PhD student Irene Eleta led our other study. She asked American native English speakers and native Spanish speakers from Spain to tag the same images. She found differences in the tags they assigned which were often culture specific. For example, on Winslow Homer’s “The Cotton Pickers”, Americans used tags like “Civil War” and “South” which Spanish taggers didn’t. This illustrates how translating tags can open up new types of access to people who use different languages and come from different cultures.

Ricky: Is there any of your research that you find would be particularly beneficial to those interested in digital stewardship?

Jennifer: Irene Eleta’s work on culture and language is very interesting. I think this is a relatively unexplored area, and there is so much that can be done by combining computational linguistics, other computing tools and metadata like tags to improve access.

Ricky: In your talk for the Digital Dialogues at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities you presented three research projects using tags on art. Could give us some background on research that was helpful informing your research in this area?

Jennifer: I come from a computer science background, so I am far from an expert in this area. I read up a lot on metadata and some existing tools and standards like the Art & Architecture Thesaurus. We also worked with museum partners who brought the art and museum professional perspective, which was very helpful.

Ricky: You explained in the talk that understanding what people are tagging and why can design better tagging systems. Could you elaborate on this idea?

Jennifer: Tags have been shown to provide a lot of new data beyond what a cataloger or museum professional will usually provide. However, to maximize the benefit of tags, it helps to understand how they will improve people’s access to the images. Worthless tags do not help access. Our work is designed to understand what kinds of tags people are applying. This can help in a few ways. First, we can compare this to the terms people are searching for. If search terms match tags, it definitely reveals that tags are useful. Second, we can see if tags are applied more to one type of image than another. For example, I mentioned that people use a lot of color and shape tags for abstract images. This means if someone searches for a color term, the results may be heavily biased toward abstract images. This has implications for tagging system design. We might build an interface that encourages people to use visual element tags on all images or we might use some computer vision techniques to extract color and shape data. At the core, by understanding what people tag, we can think about how to encourage or change the tagging they are doing in order to improve access.

Ricky: Has your research uncovered any ways to encourage tagging? If so what are some of the factors which encourage and discourage tagging?

Jennifer: We haven’t made it to that point yet. We have uncovered a number of results that suggest how we can begin to design tagging systems and what we might want to encourage, but how to do this is still an open question.

Ricky: In a study you compared tags from native English speakers from the USA and native Spanish speakers from Spain. Could you tell us a little about the findings of this investigation and how cultural heritage institutions could benefit from this research?

Jennifer: (I described this work a bit above). Cultural heritage institutions can benefit from this in a couple ways. If they have groups who use different languages, they can provide bridges between these languages to allow monolingual speakers to benefit from the cultural insights shared in another language. This can be done by translating tags on the back end of the system. It also suggests that in order to open up their collections to other cultures, language tools will be important.

Ricky: You mentioned automatic translations could help in improving the accessibility of digital collections but it was more complex than that. What are some of the pros and cons of automatic translation which you came across in your research?

Jennifer: I discussed some of the pros above. However, automated translation is a hard problem, especially when working with single words. For example, disambiguation is a classic problem. If you see the tag “blues”, does it refer to the colors or to the music? When there is surrounding text, a tool can rely on context, but that is much harder with tags. If we want to rely on translation, we will have to do more work in this area.

Ricky: Is there any other work you would like to do with data from theses studies, like the recordings of the eye-tracking sessions?

Jennifer: We have eye tracking data for people tagging images and looking at images. We also have it for people who spent time looking at an image for a while before tagging it and for people who began tagging immediately. It would be interesting to compare those to see how people look at art when they are given a task compared to when they are simply asked to look at it. Also, we can compare how people tag when they are familiar with an image vs. when they are seeing the image for the first time.

 

Most people know and love Dropbox and the way it syncs files between multiple devices, but what happens when you’ve left out a couple of files and later realize you need them but don’t have your Mac with you? Enter Spotdox. Part Mac app and part iOS-accessible web service, Spotdox is an add-on to Dropbox that lets you access any file on your computer from any location or device so long as it’s downloaded on your Mac.

All you have to do is download Spotdox and keep it running on your Mac, which will extend Dropbox’s functionality. While Dropbox only allows access to files directly in your Dropbox folder, Spotdox lets you browse, copy, and send any file or folder on your computer to any other device.

When you download Spotdox, the app will request authorization to access your Dropbox account. If you have more than one account, you can install Spotdox on each one to access files on each computer. To make sure you can access the files, make sure to enable Open Spotdox at Login from the app’s menu so that Spotdox is continually running.

To use Spotdox, just load a special Spotdox URL on another device, like a different Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Spotdox uses Spotlight on your Mac to find the file you’re looking for and then moves in into your Dropbox on request. Once it’s there, you can access the file from any Dropbox app on any Mac or iDevice.

If you find that your Dropbox is full, you can even move stuff out of it and onto your Mac from any phone or web browser. So, if you’re not at your computer, you can easily upload photos while on the road to Dropbox and then transfer them to you Mac, which frees up more space.

While pricing hasn’t been announced yet, the first 10,000 users can get a free lifetime membership account. So what are you waiting for?

The post Spotdox Lets You Access Any File On Your Computer From Anywhere With Dropbox appeared first on Macgasm.

One of my relatives asked me about Roots yesterday. She had just watched the mini series on video from the library.  She wanted to know what I thought about it.  She is a NOT a genealogist but knows that I am and she figured I had an opinion.   “Do you think this story is true?  I think it would be hard to prove all of this.”  Great observation.  African-American genealogy is challenging to say the least and Alex Haley followed his line back further than most African-American researchers are able to do.

For the best analysis of Roots, please read Elizabeth Shown Mills and Gary B Mills’ article, “The Genealogist’s Assessment of Alex Haley’s Roots” which appeared in the March 1984 issues of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.  Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG ,CGL, FASG is considered one of the top genealogists in the field and is a respected researcher and writer.

We must give credit to Alex Haley for one thing.  His book motivated people to delve into their own past and a new generation of genealogists was born.


Copyright © 2013 Michele Simmons Lewis

As a professional genealogist, much of what I do on a daily basis consists of writing. From client research reports to case studies to instructional articles or blog posts or even books, I probably write on average a half-dozen pages a day, every day. (Aside: in today’s digital world, is it still appropriate to discuss writing in terms of pages? It almost seems a bit like giving directions in terms of time, like “go down that road for seven minutes, then turn left.) This, of course, does not include the volumes of emails I compose and send every day, to clients and colleagues.

Recently Ben Yagoda, a professor of English and journalism at the University of Delaware, posted “Ben Yagoda Gets Sick of the Historical Present” on the Lingua Franca blog—an excellent blog for anyone interested in writing and editing. Mr. Yagoda gives several examples of the historical present tense, a history of its use in various genres of writing, and an exploration of why it might be so popular. He concludes that the tense is “essentially a novelty item. It’s tacky. Give it a rest.” The comments to this post are also quite informative, as a debate arises over the use of the historic present in discussing literature.[1]

There are two basic conventions for use of past and present tense in genealogical writing:

1. When discussing people or events of the past, use the past tense, e.g. “On 9 June 1827 Victoire sold L’Hermitage to John Brien.”

2. When discussing specific documents or records, use the present tense, e.g. “Baptismal records describe Caroline’s children as illegitimate” or “No Joseph Ridgely appears as a Maryland household head in 1820 or 1830 [referring to the federal census].”

The use of the historical present tense in these situations stems from the same logic as the use of the tense when discussing literature. Records exist in the present time. What they say (or don’t say) is said in the present time, when a modern reader reads it. So it would be proper to state that Victoire sold land in 1827, and that the deed describes the property in a certain way. When I look at the deed in 2013 (hypothetically) it says the same thing that it said in 1827.

Other genres tend to use the historical present to describe a past event. As historical writers, however, we should be careful to follow the two conventions mentioned above. Not only does this limit the possibility of confusion, following grammatical conventions simply makes our writing more professional.

SOURCES:

[1] Ben Yagoda, “Ben Yagoda Gets Sick of the Historical Present,” Lingua Franca blog, posted 23 April 2013 (http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : accessed 28 April 2013).

Using pedigree charts, fan charts, family group records and other forms are ubiquitous in genealogical research. But the inherent structure of these forms is not just a convenience. In many instances, the way the information is displayed hinders, rather than assists the research process. The reasons for this hinderance are fairly complex and involve a preconceived bias towards a singe kinship system based on the English/Western European model. Because genealogists have been given these specific forms for so many years, the forms are used without question and have become the standard basis for most commercial genealogy programs.

Let me give a fairly simple example of where the forms break down in representing common family and meta-family relationships. In the areas of the world that have inherited the language and traditions of the Roman Empire (commonly referred to as Romance languages today) the standard form genealogical record is unsuitable. Here is a quote from George Ryskamp's book, Tracing Your Hispanic Heritage (Ryskamp, George R. Tracing Your Hispanic Heritage. Riverside, Calif: Hispanic Family History Research, 1984, page 268) made in the context of discussing research in original Spanish parish registers:

Some may ask, "Why not take notes directly onto family group sheets?" This is a very unwise practice for a number of reasons. First, the family group sheet does not always allow for all the information contained in the original records. For example, there may be no place to put the information about padrinos (godparents)and where they are from. The other reason, perhaps more important, is that part of the value of the original records comes in recognizing the relationship between the various items of information given, and the date on which they were entered. 

This issue is not confined to those people with Hispanic roots, many cultures around the world have the same issues. In my own heritage, many of my ancestors practiced plural marriage. The standard family group sheet is entirely inadequate to even acknowledge those relationships. Likewise the actual structure of a polygamous marriage is obscured by the standard pedigree chart since there is no way to differentiate between plural marriage and serial marriage except through careful examination of the dates of the marriages and the birth dates of the children. This issue extends to any other culture where the kinship tradition is outside the "standard" Western European model.

Why is this important? Primarily because the types of information recorded and analyzed by most researchers is confined to the format of the forms they use to gather information. Using the standard forms confines the researcher to one particular world view and thereby automatically eliminates much useful and necessary information about the family. I am guessing that many of the so-called "brick wall" type problems can be attributed to this narrow view of the family and its associations and the myopic focus on inadequate forms.

Presently, there is a huge push to add "stories and photos" to the family record. The primary impetus for this movement is the involvement of the youth in genealogy and to ostensibly increase involvement in family history research. But the current format of the standard forms works against this type of additional information. For example, in the standard pedigree model as used by FamilySearch.org's Family Tree, there is nothing indicating the existence of any stories or photographs about the family. That information is limited to tabs on individuals. Without looking at each individual in a family, and in my case that can be almost a hundred individuals, you cannot tell if any of them have stories or photos.

FamilySearch is certainly not alone in this limitation. Although most contemporary program allow photos and stories to be attached to an individual, most, if not all, focus on the individual and not on the greater family structure. In most case, the link to the to photo or story must be added to each individual in the family without regard to the greater family structure and there is no way to focus on a family unit, as such, to see all the photos and stories attached to the individuals within the family.

The effect of the standard format and forms is to isolate the individual from the family structure (including godparents and other relationships) and focus on a very narrow set of preserved records. If there are or were any stories or photographs the use of pedigree charts and family group records have obscured their existence for decades. Of course there are no records that are truly individual in nature, all human records ultimately lead to the family and then on to the kinship systems and the greater cultural environment. By focusing on only a small sub-set of this information, the genealogists are losing the exact information needed to do what they are apparently trying to do; preserve the family's heritage.

Weekly column sharing genealogy-related things I’ve found.

New-to-Me Blogs

• Journeys Past, Cheri Daniels
• Don’t Forget Where We Came From
• Genealogy Addiction
• Surname Detective

Online Articles

• Public Library, Not Public Domain, The Legal Genealogist
• Tuesday’s Tip: Social Media Networks Stripping Data from Your Digital Photos, Sassy Jane Genealogy

Websites & Resources

• Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project – “The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.”

Upcoming FREE Webinars

Date / Time	Webinar / Presenter / Host
4/30 9 PM Central	An Autosomal DNA Primer: Sex Doesn’t Matter Any More Judy G. Russell Association of Professional Genealogists
5/1 1 PM Central	Researching Your Roots in Rhode Island Maureen Taylor Legacy Family Tree
5/3 1 PM Central	Blogging for Beginners with DearMYRTLE DearMYRTLE Legacy Family Tree
5/4 12 PM Central	Homespun and Calico – Researching our Foremothers Peggy Clemens Laurtizen Southern California Genealogical Society
5/14 8 PM Central	Timelines: Placing Your Heritage in Historical Perspective Laura Prescott Illinois State Genealogical Society
5/14 1 PM Central	Records of the Works Project Administration (WPA) Paula Stuart-Warren Friends of the National Archives Southeast Region
5/15 1 PM Central	Land Records Solve Research Problems Mary Hill Legacy Family Tree
5/15 8 PM Central	Options in Post-Adoption Research Debbie Mieszala Southern California Genealogical Society
5/16 8 PM Central	Using an Apple (MAC) to Make Your Tree Bret Petersen Utah Genealogical Association
5/20 7 PM Central	Harnessing the Power of Indirect Evidence Susan Sloan Georgia Genealogical Society
5/21 7 PM Central	Crossing the Pond: Successful Strategies for Researching Eastern European Ancestors Lisa Alzo Wisconsin State Genealogical Society
5/22 1 PM Central	Ten Hidden Resources Every Genealogist Should Know Lisa Alzo Legacy Family Tree

Popular Baby Names from the Early 1900s to Today was originally published at - GenealogyBank Genealogy Blog.

Did you ever wonder why your ancestors had the first names they did? Were they old names used over generations in the family, or does your family history have some names that seemingly were random with no obvious family connection?

It might be that your family chose a name because it was the name of a family friend, or maybe it was one of the popular names of their day.

Here is a list of the most popular baby names for girls and boys in the United States spanning nearly a century, from the early 1900s up to 2011. See where your family’s first names place on this list of the top baby names.

What is your favorite first name in your family tree? Share with us in the comments.

Top Five Names for Births in 1912-2011
	Females					Males
Year	Rank 1	Rank 2	Rank 3	Rank 4	Rank 5	Rank 1	Rank 2	Rank 3	Rank 4	Rank 5
2011	Sophia	Isabella	Emma	Olivia	Ava	Jacob	Mason	William	Jayden	Noah
2010	Isabella	Sophia	Emma	Olivia	Ava	Jacob	Ethan	Michael	Jayden	William
2009	Isabella	Emma	Olivia	Sophia	Ava	Jacob	Ethan	Michael	Alexander	William
2008	Emma	Isabella	Emily	Olivia	Ava	Jacob	Michael	Ethan	Joshua	Daniel
2007	Emily	Isabella	Emma	Ava	Madison	Jacob	Michael	Ethan	Joshua	Daniel
2006	Emily	Emma	Madison	Isabella	Ava	Jacob	Michael	Joshua	Ethan	Matthew
2005	Emily	Emma	Madison	Abigail	Olivia	Jacob	Michael	Joshua	Matthew	Ethan
2004	Emily	Emma	Madison	Olivia	Hannah	Jacob	Michael	Joshua	Matthew	Ethan
2003	Emily	Emma	Madison	Hannah	Olivia	Jacob	Michael	Joshua	Matthew	Andrew
2002	Emily	Madison	Hannah	Emma	Alexis	Jacob	Michael	Joshua	Matthew	Ethan
2001	Emily	Madison	Hannah	Ashley	Alexis	Jacob	Michael	Matthew	Joshua	Christopher
2000	Emily	Hannah	Madison	Ashley	Sarah	Jacob	Michael	Matthew	Joshua	Christopher
1999	Emily	Hannah	Alexis	Sarah	Samantha	Jacob	Michael	Matthew	Joshua	Nicholas
1998	Emily	Hannah	Samantha	Ashley	Sarah	Michael	Jacob	Matthew	Joshua	Christopher
1997	Emily	Jessica	Ashley	Sarah	Hannah	Michael	Jacob	Matthew	Christopher	Joshua
1996	Emily	Jessica	Ashley	Sarah	Samantha	Michael	Matthew	Jacob	Christopher	Joshua
1995	Jessica	Ashley	Emily	Samantha	Sarah	Michael	Matthew	Christopher	Jacob	Joshua
1994	Jessica	Ashley	Emily	Samantha	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	Tyler
1993	Jessica	Ashley	Sarah	Samantha	Emily	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	Tyler
1992	Ashley	Jessica	Amanda	Brittany	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	Andrew
1991	Ashley	Jessica	Brittany	Amanda	Samantha	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	Andrew
1990	Jessica	Ashley	Brittany	Amanda	Samantha	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	Daniel
1989	Jessica	Ashley	Brittany	Amanda	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	David
1988	Jessica	Ashley	Amanda	Sarah	Jennifer	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	Andrew
1987	Jessica	Ashley	Amanda	Jennifer	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	David
1986	Jessica	Ashley	Amanda	Jennifer	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	David
1985	Jessica	Ashley	Jennifer	Amanda	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	Daniel
1984	Jennifer	Jessica	Ashley	Amanda	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Joshua	David
1983	Jennifer	Jessica	Amanda	Ashley	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	David	Joshua
1982	Jennifer	Jessica	Amanda	Sarah	Melissa	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Jason	David
1981	Jennifer	Jessica	Amanda	Sarah	Melissa	Michael	Christopher	Matthew	Jason	David
1980	Jennifer	Amanda	Jessica	Melissa	Sarah	Michael	Christopher	Jason	David	James
1979	Jennifer	Melissa	Amanda	Jessica	Amy	Michael	Christopher	Jason	David	James
1978	Jennifer	Melissa	Jessica	Amy	Heather	Michael	Jason	Christopher	David	James
1977	Jennifer	Melissa	Amy	Jessica	Heather	Michael	Jason	Christopher	David	James
1976	Jennifer	Amy	Melissa	Heather	Angela	Michael	Jason	Christopher	David	James
1975	Jennifer	Amy	Heather	Melissa	Angela	Michael	Jason	Christopher	James	David
1974	Jennifer	Amy	Michelle	Heather	Angela	Michael	Jason	Christopher	David	James
1973	Jennifer	Amy	Michelle	Kimberly	Lisa	Michael	Christopher	Jason	James	David
1972	Jennifer	Michelle	Lisa	Kimberly	Amy	Michael	Christopher	James	David	John
1971	Jennifer	Michelle	Lisa	Kimberly	Amy	Michael	James	David	John	Robert
1970	Jennifer	Lisa	Kimberly	Michelle	Amy	Michael	James	David	John	Robert
1969	Lisa	Michelle	Jennifer	Kimberly	Melissa	Michael	David	James	John	Robert
1968	Lisa	Michelle	Kimberly	Jennifer	Melissa	Michael	David	John	James	Robert
1967	Lisa	Kimberly	Michelle	Mary	Susan	Michael	David	James	John	Robert
1966	Lisa	Kimberly	Mary	Michelle	Karen	Michael	David	James	John	Robert
1965	Lisa	Mary	Karen	Kimberly	Susan	Michael	John	David	James	Robert
1964	Lisa	Mary	Susan	Karen	Patricia	Michael	John	David	James	Robert
1963	Lisa	Mary	Susan	Karen	Linda	Michael	John	David	James	Robert
1962	Lisa	Mary	Susan	Karen	Linda	Michael	David	John	James	Robert
1961	Mary	Lisa	Susan	Linda	Karen	Michael	David	John	James	Robert
1960	Mary	Susan	Linda	Karen	Donna	David	Michael	James	John	Robert
1959	Mary	Susan	Linda	Karen	Donna	Michael	David	James	John	Robert
1958	Mary	Susan	Linda	Karen	Patricia	Michael	David	James	Robert	John
1957	Mary	Susan	Linda	Debra	Karen	Michael	James	David	Robert	John
1956	Mary	Debra	Linda	Deborah	Susan	Michael	James	Robert	David	John
1955	Mary	Deborah	Linda	Debra	Susan	Michael	David	James	Robert	John
1954	Mary	Linda	Deborah	Patricia	Susan	Michael	James	Robert	John	David
1953	Mary	Linda	Deborah	Patricia	Susan	Robert	James	Michael	John	David
1952	Linda	Mary	Patricia	Deborah	Susan	James	Robert	John	Michael	David
1951	Linda	Mary	Patricia	Deborah	Barbara	James	Robert	John	Michael	David
1950	Linda	Mary	Patricia	Barbara	Susan	James	Robert	John	Michael	David
1949	Linda	Mary	Patricia	Barbara	Susan	James	Robert	John	William	Michael
1948	Linda	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Susan	James	Robert	John	William	David
1947	Linda	Mary	Patricia	Barbara	Sandra	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1946	Mary	Linda	Patricia	Barbara	Carol	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1945	Mary	Linda	Barbara	Patricia	Carol	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1944	Mary	Barbara	Linda	Patricia	Carol	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1943	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Linda	Carol	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1942	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Linda	Carol	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1941	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Carol	Linda	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1940	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Judith	Betty	James	Robert	John	William	Richard
1939	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Betty	Shirley	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1938	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Betty	Shirley	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1937	Mary	Barbara	Patricia	Shirley	Betty	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1936	Mary	Shirley	Barbara	Betty	Patricia	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1935	Mary	Shirley	Barbara	Betty	Patricia	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1934	Mary	Betty	Barbara	Shirley	Dorothy	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1933	Mary	Betty	Barbara	Dorothy	Joan	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1932	Mary	Betty	Barbara	Dorothy	Joan	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1931	Mary	Betty	Dorothy	Barbara	Joan	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1930	Mary	Betty	Dorothy	Helen	Margaret	Robert	James	John	William	Richard
1929	Mary	Betty	Dorothy	Helen	Margaret	Robert	James	John	William	Charles
1928	Mary	Betty	Dorothy	Helen	Margaret	Robert	John	James	William	Charles
1927	Mary	Dorothy	Betty	Helen	Margaret	Robert	John	James	William	Charles
1926	Mary	Dorothy	Betty	Helen	Margaret	Robert	John	James	William	Charles
1925	Mary	Dorothy	Betty	Helen	Margaret	Robert	John	William	James	Charles
1924	Mary	Dorothy	Helen	Betty	Margaret	Robert	John	William	James	Charles
1923	Mary	Dorothy	Helen	Margaret	Betty	John	Robert	William	James	Charles
1922	Mary	Dorothy	Helen	Margaret	Ruth	John	Robert	William	James	Charles
1921	Mary	Dorothy	Helen	Margaret	Ruth	John	Robert	William	James	Charles
1920	Mary	Dorothy	Helen	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	Robert	James	Charles
1919	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Charles
1918	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Charles
1917	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Joseph
1916	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Joseph
1915	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Joseph
1914	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Joseph
1913	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Joseph
1912	Mary	Helen	Dorothy	Margaret	Ruth	John	William	James	Robert	Joseph

Get more great genealogy tips and tools at - GenealogyBank Genealogy Blog and be sure to visit Genealogy Bank to start researching your ancestry online.

When was the last time you took a class on the history of the country you live in? When was the last time you took a class on the history of the country your ancestors came from? Have you ever read a book on either subject? If you live in the United States or the United Kingdom or Australia or France or Canada or Poland or any other country, what do you know about the history of your country?

If genealogy is that branch of history that involves the study for the determination of family relationships (See Greenwood, Val D. The Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub. Co, 2000, page 8) then doesn't it follow that genealogists should know their own history?

My brother is a college history professor and is always commenting on the dismal lack of knowledge of the general population about their own country's history. I find it interesting that most basic genealogy courses virtually ignore history. Although there are notable exceptions, most genealogical conference offerings focus on methodology and not specifically on history. Is it generally assumed that genealogists are also historians and already know the history of their respective countries? I have personally frequently observed genealogical researchers who had only the barest sort of idea that there was a history component to genealogy (or is it the other way around).

If you find a relative born in the United States that lived in the middle 1800s, do you automatically think U.S. Civil War or does that only come after you have researched and found few records? Do you think of the Great Depression and what that might have meant to your ancestor families? What about the effects of World War I and World War II on your ancestors? What effect do you think the wars had on where you might find their records and what records you might find? What do you know about migration patterns? Where did your ancestors pay their taxes and who collected those taxes?

In many cases, trying to find your ancestors may be impossible without a clear understanding of very local history. When was the last time you read a book about the history of the county where your family lived? Have you read a book about the Army or Navy unit your ancestor served in? Unfortunately, I have found that my suggestions to researchers to look to the history of the area they are researching has frequently fallen on deaf ears.

Too many people, perhaps conditioned by high school level history classes, think history is all about dates. Of course, dates are important. I often remember an entry in the FamilySearch Family Tree claiming that one of my ancestors was born in Cottonwood, Utah in 1795. I guess I was surprised to learn that I had Native American ancestors. If you don't understand the point of that comment, perhaps you need to know a little more about U.S. history!

The current hot topic in genealogy is apparently stories and photographs. What are stories about our ancestors? History, plain and simple. If you felt that the history classes you had in school were boring, perhaps that was more a reflection of the teacher's ability than the subject. It may also have been your own lack of interest. Jorge Augustin Nicolas de Santayana y Borras is often quoted (and misquoted) when he said,  "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

See Santayana, George. The Life of Reason; Or, The Phases of Human Progress. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905.
I think I would paraphrase this quote for genealogists as "Those who cannot remember or who do know their past are condemned to do unrewarding research over and over again." 

Street View on Google Earth and Google Maps on streets in much of the  United States is wonderful, but it hasn't provided much for those of us interested in Eastern Europe. However, a couple of days ago, the Google Earth Blog noted that Street View has been added for Hungary and expanded for Romania and Poland. Now you may be able to walk some of the main streets of your ancestral community without ever leaving home.

For those who are not savvy on using the Google Maps or Google Earth applications, Street View may be accessed via the little yellow peg man on the upper left or right of your map image. If you don't see him on a map that may include Street View, zoom in until he appears. Place the cursor on him, click, hold and drag him over the map. Blue lines will appear on the map indicating streets where Street View is available. There is a short video tutorial on using Street View on the Google Earth Blog post.

I decided to look at the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest. Starting in Google maps, I searched on the name, found the map, zoomed in and then dragged the little guy over the map. Voila! The images are from 2011.

Dohany Street Synagogue, Budapest, Hungary  (from GoogleMaps.com)

One may use the arrow keys on one's computer keyboard to move around on the street. Here's a shot looking in the other direction.

I decided to see what they might have in some more rural areas of Hungary. I headed east toward the border with Ukraine. This Street View in Opalyi, Szabolecs-Szatmar-Bereg County, Hungary was done in Dec 2011.

  
What I really like about this is that I can move down the street and the very next image shows a change of season (!): an image taken the following Spring. Sort of feels like The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy starts dreaming in Technicolor.

  
To close out of Street View and get back to your map, click on the small X in the upper right of the map or satellite photo.

Right now coverage in Street View of Ukraine and several other Eastern European countries is still, literally, spotty. In Google Maps search on a country. Try Ukraine. Drag peg man and hover him over the map. What you see are many little square spots and a few larger blobs on large cities. The square spots indicate locations of static photos in Panoramio. The blobs are places where Street View is active. This includes:
Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and parts of Chernivtsi and Khotyn. This is nice, but not as nice as what is currently possible for the main streets in more rural areas of Romania and Hungary.

I hope there will be expanded Street View soon in Ukraine. Then I can shtetl-shlep from the confines of my computer.

Have you been able to "walk" the streets of your village in Eastern Europe using Street View? Let me know with a comment below. 

My Fab Finds for this week are (in no particular order)

1. This RootsTech "grousing" is for the birds by Dear Myrtle
2. RootsTech Official Bloggers Get Critiqued by The Olive Tree Genealogy
3. Dear Diary: It Seems I’ve Been a Bad Official Blogger by GeneaBloggers
4. In My Defense…And Other Thoughts by GenBlog
5. The Posts I Most Wish Official Bloggers Would Write by My Ancestors and Me
6. Other Blog Posts from NERGC by Nutfield Genealogy
7. And in my spare time … by A Worthington Weblog
8. The Goldenstein Trunk AND Swedish Church Records at Ancestry.com Are Not Full-Name Indexed by RootDig.com
9. Two Terrific Free Sites for Online City Directory Research by The Ancestor Hunt
10. Church Record Sunday: Digital Public Library of America by Gena's Genealogy
11. My first look at the Digital Public Library of America by Ancestral Breezes
12. Where Do Questions Fit In At Genealogy Conferences by Desperately Seeking Surnames
13. Sharing Blogging Thoughts by Granite in My Blood
14. My 1st Blogiversary! by Abbie and Eveline
15. Crossing the Pond to Roots in Ireland by GeneaJourneys
16. Don't Just Use the Local Newspaper by Genealogy Tip of the Day
17. The records of death by The Legal Genealogist
18. Blogging Genealogy: Roll Out the Welcome Mat by BloggingGenealogy.com
19. Blogger vs. WordPress.com: A Complete Comparison by Tim Brookes for MakeUseOf.com
20. Piecing Together Their Lives by A Southern Sleuth
21. Story Spark #9: Bond with an Ancestor by Your Story Coach
22. It's Official. Clark Kent and Lois Lane Are On the Job by The Family Curator
23. When Google Reader Goes by My Ancestors and Me
24. Sporting My New FGS Conference Ambassador Badge by A Sense of Family
25. Donald R. Snow: Some Things I Learned at RootsTech 2013 by Renee's Genealogy Blog

New Blog Discoveries

• The Dead Relative Collector
• No Hoof Left Behind
• Australian Genealogy Journeys
• Home of Sherlocks
• Genealogist Journal
• Ellie's Ancestors

In Case You Missed Them….My Contributions to the Genealogy Blogosphere This Week

• Tombstone Tuesday ~ Eunice (Waterman) Crary and James Lewis Crary   Have you checked out the new-to-me tombstone website I shared in this blog post yet?
• Wordless Wednesday (well, almost) ~ Mary Crary Boggess

Thanks for reading!


© 2013 Copyright by Jana Last

In honor of DNA Day, celebrated on April 25, the ACLU gives you an insider's take on our Supreme Court Argument on gene patenting.

Are human genes patentable? That is the question at issue in AMP v. Myriad Genetics, which the ACLU argued before the Supreme Court on Monday, April 15.

"One way to address the question presented by this case is what exactly did Myriad invent? And the answer is nothing."

That is how my colleague, Chris Hansen, began his argument. For the next 20 minutes, Chris engaged in a spirited discourse with the Justices about genes and patents. He argued that the patents issued to Myriad on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with breast and ovarian cancer, must be held invalid because genes – as parts of our body and codes for our genetic makeup – are products and laws of nature. Because of its patents, Myriad has the authority to stop all research on the genes and is the only company in the United States that can provide diagnostic testing for mutations on the genes, and thus can charge exorbitant amounts for these tests (currently over $4000 per patient).

The Justices responded favorably. They discussed the science of genetics and appeared to understand what is at stake in allowing a company to own a patent on these basic components of human life – namely that scientific research is stifled and patients are limited in the diagnostic information they can obtain and use to make critical decisions about their medical treatment. Our clients in the case are women who have or are at risk of hereditary breast or ovarian cancer, breast cancer and women's health groups, geneticists, genetic counselors, and scientific associations representing approximately 150,000 pathologists, researchers, and laboratory professionals. These clients are harmed by the patents because they are unable to afford Myriad's test or to get a second opinion necessary to make decisions such as whether to have prophylactic surgery, or are unable to conduct research on the genes or provide diagnostic testing to patients.

After Chris argued, the Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, argued for 10 minutes on behalf of the government. Although the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office – a part of the federal government - issued the patents to Myriad in the 1990s, the Obama Administration filed a friend-of-the-court brief agreeing with the ACLU on the basic point that patents on the BRCA genes are invalid. Verrilli opened his argument by saying, "Enforcing the distinction between human invention and a product of nature preserves a necessary balance in the patent system between encouraging individual inventors and keeping the basic building blocks of innovation free for all to use. Isolated DNA falls on the ineligible side of that divide because it is simply native DNA extracted from the body."

It is this point – how different is "isolated DNA" from the DNA in our body – that is at the crux of the argument. Under patent law, a patent cannot issue on something unless it is "markedly different" from a product of nature. Myriad's attorney, Gregory Castanias, argued that once the gene was removed from the body it became a "new molecule" that Myriad "invented." Justice Sotomayor challenged Castanias on this claim using a chocolate chip cookie analogy:

I can bake a chocolate chip cookie using natural ingredients – salt, flour, eggs, butter – and I create my chocolate chip cookie. And if I combust those in some new way, I can get a patent on that. But I can't imagine getting a patent simply on the basic items of salt, flour and eggs, simply because I've created a new use or a new product from those ingredients.

The best Castanias could do in answering Justice Sotomayor was to argue that the chemical composition of the isolated DNA is different from that of the DNA in our bodies because the gene is connected to other chemicals when it is in the body. Accordingly, Castanias argued, Myriad created an invention by determining where the gene began and ended. He tried his own analogy; he said, "A baseball bat doesn't exist until it's isolated from a tree. But that's still the product of human invention to decide where to begin the bat and where to end the bat."

However, Chief Justice Roberts took issue with the baseball bat metaphor saying, "The baseball bat is quite different. You don't look at a tree and say, well, I've cut the branch here and cut it here and all of a sudden I've got a baseball bat. You have to invent it, if you will."

Through all these analogies, the Justices grappled with the complex field of genetics and the process of sequencing genes, which is what Myriad and other scientists do when they identify the nucleotide pairs on the gene in a patient's blood sample and compare that sequence to a "normal" BRCA gene to determine whether she has a mutation that is correlated with an increased risk of breast or ovarian cancer. The analogies and the reasoning from those analogies indicated that several of the Justices viewed the BRCA genes, on which Myriad has obtained patents, as products of nature. If the isolated genes are products or laws of nature, then the Court should hold that the patents are invalid.

Notwithstanding the fact that Myriad may have invested time and money into discovering the location of the BRCA genes (much of which money came from public funding and at the time many other scientists were racing to map the location of these genes), because all the company did was discover something that nature created, it is not entitled to a patent on the genes. As my colleague Chris argued:

Myriad unlocked the secrets of two human genes. These are genes that correlate with an increased risk of breast or ovarian cancer. But the genes themselves, their – where they start and stop, what they do, what they are made of, and what happens when they go wrong are all decisions that were made by nature, not by Myriad. Now, Myriad deserves credit for having unlocked these secrets. Myriad does not deserve a patent for it.

We are hopeful that the Court will agree. We expect the Court to issue its decision in this case by June.

Learn more about gene patenting and other civil liberty issues: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Image scanning of one sort or another has been in common usage in some industries since the 1920s.

Yes, really, the 1920s.

The news wire services used telephotography — where images are captured using photo cells and transmitted over phone lines — well into the 1990s.  Scanners and digital cameras like those we are familiar with came out of development in the 1960s and 1970s, and were already hitting the commercial market by the 1980s.

I have vivid memories of my first digitization project, because that project changed the course of my career.

In 1986 I was in graduate school and volunteering for the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at UCLA.  One day the Collections Manager came down to the archaeology collections in the sub-basement (where I was surveying the human skeletal remains in the collections for our NAGPRA records) and said to me: “How would you like to move from the sub-basement to the basement”?  How could anyone say no to that?

The project was to do a recon on all the paper records and enter them into the brand new Argus system running on a mini-mainframe.  I am pretty certain that we were Questor’s second customer, after the Southwest Museum. While the recon project taught me the basics about what became the focus of my career — collection records management, digitization, system administration, being a DBA, working with authority control and creating multilingual controlled vocabularies — what was particularly exciting about the system was that it had the capacity to link to digital images.

So we started digitizing.  We had acquired a particularly exciting and important archaeological collection, and I had the opportunity to work on the digitization.  The objects were set on a stand and the image was captured via a video camera and written to tape, with a video titler used to embed the accession number into the image. The tapes were then mastered onto laser disks.

Now, this was very cutting edge – one entered an address for an image on a laser disk into a field in the object record, and the system could address the file on the laser disk and display it on a dedicated terminal. We had an early Sony Mavica camera, which used 3.5″ floppy disks as its storage media. And we had a printer, which printed color photos the size of old school Polaroids. It was heady stuff.

In 1988 I attended my first Museum Computer Network conference, another event that shaped my career.  The 1989 MCN meeting was the pivotal one.  We had our first meeting of a Visual Information SIG, where at least a dozen organizations shared their experiments, successes, and failures with digital imaging. I still have my write-up from that meeting, which appeared as a column in Spectra. I chaired that group for many years, and that group helped build a community around imaging practice that still exists.

Of course there were many early leaders and innovators in digital imaging. The American Museum of Natural History.  The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Thinker imagebase. The Library of Congress American Memory project.  Harvard University’s libraries and museums. Numerous Smithsonian projects. And too many others to name.

What other imaging projects were people involved in during the 1980s?  If you are interested in the history of digital imaging I suggest the Digital Imaging page at CoOl, which includes a great historical bibliography. Not all the links work, but it’s a great jumping-off point for a history of the discipline.

In brief: The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched last week. This article attempts to tease out the librarian response to DPLA and explore what it means for the future of the library in popular imagination, as well as in our field. I describe the what, who, and how of DPLA and ask, after two years of work on the project, what can librarians can expect from DPLA and what does DPLA expect from us? This article concludes by proposing that librarians want four things from DPLA: Advocacy, Inclusion, Investment and Clarity.

 

Introduction:

Two years ago I took a gigantic leap of professionalism and subscribed to my first mailing list ever, the Digital Public Library of America Discussion list. The concepts and ideals behind the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) were just coming into shape and I was so excited about it that I went so far as to agree to have it inundate my email inbox. Not long after, I wrote a post about DPLA for the blog, HackLibrarySchool, in which I spelled out some of my interest in the project, as well as some important questions to consider. Quoting myself, “the reason [DPLA] feels so important, is that a group of capable and brilliant folks from a variety of reputable institutions (libraries, institutes, universities) have identified a need, and have initiated a grand idea to address that need.” Now, with the launch of DPLA, I’d like to provide a quick overview of how the project has grown, where it is going, and most importantly, what it means for librarians. Following a brief introduction to the project, I survey the literature about it, introduce some questions and issues with which the DPLA still needs to contend, and close by suggesting a possible collaborative future including the work we do in large-scale projects like this.

What is the Digital Public Library of America?

The concept of a national public library is not new. Traditionally, the Library of Congress (LOC) is seen as the national library of America, for good reason, but the LOC’s stated mission is primarily to serve the research needs of the U.S. Congress. With the wealth of digital information and the tools finally becoming available, extensible, and accessible, governments around the globe are beginning projects to create “digital libraries” of their heritage and history. In fact, DPLA planning documents mention the national libraries of Norway, The Netherlands, and South Korea as models to explore.

 There are three layers to the project: a portal, which is the public-facing website with search functions; a platform, the code underlying the technical infrastructure, which is open source  so that others can build on top of it; and a partnership, which pairs this project with libraries, museums, archives, funders, universities, schools, and other institutions, to advance the mission of libraries in providing access to information. The DPLA, in its current incarnation, is primarily a metadata repository that pulls open data from cultural heritage collections at multiple institutions and centralizes it. As stated in DPLA’s mission, “The DPLA is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.”

While collecting numerous digital objects into one point of access may seem idealistic, DPLA is taking practical steps in a sensible direction. Building on the work of related projects like HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America intends to capitalize on previous and ongoing digitization projects by letting many digital objects be discoverable on one platform. However, there are numerous things to consider when launching a digital project with regards to the target audience/participation, scope of content, finances/business models, governance, legal issues, and technical aspects. Luckily, those were the exact areas that the DPLA identified as “workstreams,” in which qualified and competent professionals worked for the past two years. Those workstreams have now been consolidated into committees that will continue to inform the development of the project.

The focus on cultural heritage collections, an early example of which can be seen in Leaving Europe —a jointly curated DPLA/Europeana virtual exhibit—allows DPLA to begin quickly with content that is already easily accessible. John Palfrey, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and lead spokesperson for DPLA, states, “In its first iteration, the DPLA will combine a group of rich, interesting digital collections, from state and regional digital archives to the special collections of major university libraries and federal holdings. DPLA will demonstrate how powerful and exciting it can be to bring together our nation’s digitized materials, metadata (including catalog records, for instance), code, and digital tools and services into an open, shared resource” (Palfrey, 2013).  There has been a great deal of discussion about including books (e- or otherwise), orphan works, scholarly materials in open access institutional repositories, and other readily available digital corpora. Going forward, these other content types may be considered for inclusion in the DPLA, though the version of the DPLA that launched last week includes only metadata related to cultural heritage objects.

Who is involved in DPLA?

Committees

Conversations about a broad, multi-institutional collaboration on a national digital library in America began at an October 2010 meeting of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, culminating in a Steering Committee. In December 2010, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society convened a meeting that would produce the DPLA Secretariat, directed by Maura Marx of Open Knowledge Commons. With the foundations laid, these teams began to define the details, possibilities, and grand ideals of the Digital Public Library of America. The work of the Steering Committee and the Secretariat was invaluable to the early progress of DPLA, in addition to the individuals listed below.

Robert Darnton

“A Library Without Walls,” a piece written by Robert Darnton for the New York Review of Books, is generally seen as the inception of the DPLA. Darnton is a historian and the Director of Harvard University Libraries. He has remained involved in the conception and governance of DPLA, serving on the Steering Committee as well as being a public voice for the project from time to time.

John Palfrey

A director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Palfrey has been the most vocal and visible proponent of DPLA since early planning meetings, and currently serves as President of the DPLA Board of Directors. He previously directed Harvard’s Law School Library and is now the Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover. Palfrey’s book Born Digital may have run across your desk at some point.

Dan Cohen

Only recently announced as Executive Director of DPLA, Dan Cohen brings years of experience leading the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) on high-profile digital humanities projects like Zotero, Press Forward, and Hacking The Academy. Cohen, a digital historian, brings – as the Library Loon has pointed out –  public presence, authority, and gravitas to the position.¹

Emily Gore

The first official employee of DPLA, Emily Gore has worked in libraries and technology for 12 years. As the Director of Content, Gore oversees the “what” that will become DPLA’s collections. She was most recently employed as the Associate Dean of Digital Scholarship and Technology at Florida State University and is a 2011 graduate of the Frye Leadership Institute.²

Amy Rudersdorf

As DPLA’s Assistant Director of Content, Amy Rudersdorf “is responsible for digitization partnerships and related workflows, metadata normalization and shareability, and community engagement to promote the DPLA as a community resource.” She is a leader in digital preservation and also teaches metadata and digital libraries for graduate programs in library and information science.

Partner Organizations

From the very beginning, DPLA was lent credence due to the partner organizations that signed on in support of the initiative. The Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives pledged content partnerships early on, and in recent weeks the New York Public Library, ArtSTOR, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have all signed on as well. The fact that there is an open invitation to “join” allows DPLA to build a coalition that will draw more interest and investment. A full list of the current partner organizations is available on the website. In addition to content, DPLA secured funding from the Sloan Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities and others, marking it as a worthy investment for prestigious funding organizations.

The Public (Me and You and Everyone We Know)

Early conversations surrounding DPLA included worries that a project of this scale might not include enough people from the library community. These concerns were addressed in multiple ways, which I will illuminate later in this article. Primarily, the project extended multiple calls for participation, including a public wiki, the aforementioned listservs, open workstreams, Appfests, and Beta Sprints, and many librarians and others had a hand in creating what it now is. A Get Involved page invites continued participation and asserts the DPLA’s insistance on this project continuing to be built as a community.

 The prevailing zeitgeist of open, collaborative, “public,” project-based, and community-built and -owned initiatives serves the DPLA well. Margaret Heller, writing for ACRL Tech Connect, reported from DPLA Midwest, “I found the meeting to be inspirational about the future for libraries to cross boundaries and build exciting new collections. I still have many unanswered questions, but as everyone throughout the day understands, this will be a platform on which we can build and imagine” (Heller, 2012). In a similar spirit to the crowdsourced participation of Wikipedia, “The DPLA… [is] very leanly staffed with tons of volunteers,” says John Palfrey.  Thousands of librarians, technologists, students, professors, curators, and administrators worked to build the project over two years through discussions and hackathons. “This may feel like a utopian project,” Palfrey continues. “If we don’t aim for what we want, we’ll sell ourselves short. We need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade” (Borman, 2012).

What DPLA isn’t

DPLA is not a public library, a content repository, or a threat to traditional library services.

In defining a massive project of this scope, calling it a “public library” has led some in the profession to dismiss it outright, or at least question its motives. The Chief Officers of State Library Associations went so far as to issue a resolution [PDF] that the name be changed. How could a well-funded, Harvard-based, academic-focused, non-librarian-led thing purport to call itself a “public library”? The inclusion of “public” in the title is important in defining the role of this organization in our country’s mind. People understand that the items in a public library’s collection belong to them and are available for their use. So it should also be with DPLA, Dan Cohen wrote, claiming that public libraries engender trust, localness, relevance, and familiarity. The ultimate decision to call the project the Digital Public Library of America was a conscious one, reflecting an intention to make it known that the public are invited and expected to claim ownership of the collection. It is not a public library in the same way that the Brooklyn Public Library is, yet the goals and hopes of the organization are the same.

 As it is now, content (digital objects/files) from digital libraries that partner with DPLA will remain with the institutions. Only the metadata about those objects will be harvested for display and discovery from “hubs” like the Smithsonian Institution or the Digital Library of Georgia (the full list of hubs is available online). This approach accomplishes two things at once: 1) it utilizes the “open data” that is becoming more essential for the discoverability of online digital collections, and 2) it is creating a model by which potential future “donors” can participate in the DPLA. Digitization efforts at regional, state, or local institutions will have a single point of access to make their cultural objects and artifacts available to their communities, the general public, and researchers. The motivation for including your library’s digital collections in the DPLA is the increased discoverability and cross-collection connections that will be more evident when searching inside one aggregated platform.

It is important to remember that we (DPLA and the field of librarianship, writ large) are on the same team, working diligently to provide access to information. It is for the users, not for us. DPLA has the potential to be an additional resource for the library community to connect our patrons with the wealth of knowledge and information we protect and preserve. Seeing it as anything but an incredible resource would be a disservice. Peter Murray, in a report from the Audience and Participation Workstream meeting at George Mason University, lists the variety of groups that this resource might affect. His list includes “Casual Searchers, Genealogy, Hardcore Enthusiasts, Wikipedia/Open Source Folks; info nerds, Small business/startups, Writers/Journalism, Artists, Students, Public School Teachers, Home schoolers, Scholars, Other Digital Libraries, State Libraries, Public Libraries/Public Librarians, Museums, and Historical Societies” (Murray, 2012). Approaching the DPLA as a resource for our users, in combination with the long list of skills and competencies that librarians of all types possess, will serve to strengthen our shared goal to enlighten and inspire.

What librarians think of DPLA

Nearly absent from taking a leading role in DPLA is the American Library Association. Aside from the occasional editorial in American Libraries magazine, time and space at annual conferences for DPLA-based discussions or presentations, and the current president of ALA, Maureen Sullivan, sitting on the Marketing and Outreach committee, there has not been any significant visible support for the project in the multitude of committees, offices, round tables or divisions of ALA. A statement from Alan Inouye, director of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy, expresses nominal interest, without much substance, saying, “ALA is following the development of the DPLA with great interest and optimism… The very creation of the DPLA enterprise has raised the profile of libraries in the digital age… ALA appreciates the ambitious and perhaps daunting scale and scope of the DPLA undertaking” (Cottrell, 2013). Representing some significant portion of librarianship, with membership at 60,000, ALA appears to have purposefully distanced itself from active participation in the DPLA for reasons that have yet to be disclosed.

The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) is also largely missing from the DPLA infrastructure. Perhaps indicative of their thoughts on the project, the OCLC report, “America’s Digital Future: Advancing a shared strategy for digital public libraries,” vocalizes desires for public library involvement in the creation of a national library. The opening pages of the report, based on a meeting at Los Angeles Public Library, state,

Library leaders contributing to this discussion agreed: many public librarians feel behind in the evolution to a more digital library. Participants noted that academic and research libraries have made more strides in shaping a digital future, evidenced in the major projects and new efforts of organizations such as the HathiTrust. Participants also noted that the rapidly evolving digital activities in the commercial sector, such as e-books and e-book reading devices, are “changing the game” for public libraries, and that public libraries have been too slow in generating a national, concerted plan (De Rosa, et al, 2011).

Early criticisms of DPLA included charges that public libraries had not been consulted or included in the planning or leadership of the project. To the contrary, everyone involved in DPLA— including Robert Darnton, John Palfrey, Emily Gore, and Dan Cohen—have made it clear that DPLA is meant to connect people with the local and public institution, not direct them away from it. Palfrey goes so far as to urge libraries that their involvement is fundamental and necessary. He writes that “libraries must make a digital shift, charting a course that is different from our present direction. No one should fear (or act like) libraries are going away, but we need to continue to strive to change the services they provide and to build the case for them in a digital era” (Palfrey, 2013).

David Rothman, founder of TeleRead and LibraryCity.org, has been vocal about approaching this project cautiously, especially in regards to K-12 education and school librarians, who are intended as a primary target of this initiative. His editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “It’s Time for a National Digital-Library System: But it can’t serve only elites,” mentions the extreme focus on humanities-based content, to the exclusion of scientific, medical, mathematical, business, and vocational collections. He also accuses DPLA of engaging in high-academic rhetoric, “while ignoring, for instance, reference services, user communities, and grass-roots content like oral histories” (Rothman, 2011). Some of his concerns (a breadth of content beyond cultural heritage objects and flexible technology) are now recognizable goals of DPLA’s continued growth. Rothman’s suggestions that DPLA remain invested in literacy and the digital divide are also well-taken; these issues will remain at the forefront of libraries regardless of a national digital library’s claims of access for all.

Nate Hill, Assistant Director of the Chattanooga Public Library, offers a different take, proposing that DPLA offers public libraries a reformative path.

I think that the DPLA is a great opportunity for libraries to shift their focus to supporting a different set of activities in our buildings… creation activities: the production of new knowledge for personal growth and sometimes even the public good.  The future of public libraries lies in supporting creative endeavors in their local community and empowering the patrons to contribute their creative work back to the community or to the whole world via the internet… There is no other institution doing this work, and public libraries are best situated to fill the gap (Hill, 2011).

The evolving mission of the library is a discussion that flows across interdisciplinary lines and Hill encapsulates it nicely. His assertion could as easily be applied to academic libraries. Since DPLA is a concept of an academic librarian and the investment of many in the higher education enterprise, it seems the research library community has more easily embraced the project. This is in no small part due to the focus on research and access to primary sources that has led academic libraries, museums, and historical societies to actively pursue digitization projects, content which can easily be ingested to the DPLA version 1.0. The DPLA will play an important role in the ongoing transformation of “The Library” from a strictly consumptive space to a broadly creative space due to its open infrastructure, collaborative ethos, and hopefully even involving the public in the creation and curation of content.

In late 2011, Molly Raphael, at the time President-Elect of the American Library Association, echoed Hill’s opportunist bent, albeit cautiously. Listing “the issues that generated the most passionate discussions,” she writes (adding her own thoughts in parentheses):

●   Should we only consider open access, or should we think about the possibility of tiered access? (My take: Open access seemed to rule the day.)

●   What is being conveyed by including “public” in the name? (My take: Let’s not get too bogged down on the name, but we need to be careful about what we convey by the words we use.)

●   Whose voices were we missing, such as school librarians or others, and how do we make sure that the tent is “big” and welcoming? (My take: The tent kept getting bigger as more people were invited, but we knew that we needed to consider the question: “Who is not in the room that should be in the room?”)

●   How should we approach the challenge—look for low-hanging fruit, such as material already in the public domain? Seek to tackle the issue of orphan works, where much of the content that researchers want can be found? Build on the work of those who are already building large digital libraries? (My take: We have opportunities to build more coordinated access to much that is already available digitally, but let us not lose sight of the importance of access to those sources that have legal complications.)

●   How can we be sure that we put needed focus on metadata and APIs and not just on capturing the content? (My take: Thank goodness this effort is being driven by librarians and researchers who care about the keys to access.)

●   How important is it to tackle copyright revision? Do we have the tools we need without thinking about that now? (My take: This is a tough one. Opinion about what we can or can’t do under current law is divided, but generally most agreed that we would need to press for copyright revision eventually, particularly for orphan works) (Raphael, 2012).

Many of the issues Raphael lists are similar to the current focuses of the research and academic librarian community: copyright, re/use of metadata, open access, and the “big tent” approach to building and consensus-making, are defining the culture of higher education. In contrast to the aforementioned public library considerations, there has been much less of an active response from academic librarians. Several research libraries have joined as partners, expressing obvious support at the institutional level, but individuals have been less forthcoming. Perhaps this is due to the fact that academic libraries are more deeply invested in access to primary source materials and are more agile in approaching technological changes, as that seems to be the trend in higher education. The academic library conversation, then, is more topic-specific (ex. copyright) than focused on large-scale projects. Or, academic libraries are approaching the project with distanced interest, beholden first to the goals of their school and the bureaucracy that often entails. College and Research Libraries News briefly mentioned DPLA in its Top Trends of 2012 report as a project worthy of attention. That report lists trends that include digital preservation, data curation, and scholarly communication, which are all related to the work and goals of DPLA.

Finally, for a personal perspective on DPLA, Andy Woodworth provides a specific sense of why this massive project may have yet to breach the consciousness of the larger library community. He writes,

“The Digital Public Library of America seems like the Manhattan Project: it’s massive, complex, has great minds from many different fields working on it, and not many people know about it. Not because it is secretive [and] not for a lack of exposure… It just hasn’t arrived at the tipping point of intruding on the lives of librarians on their home turf. That’s where I find myself: how will this affect my community?” (Woodworth, 2012.)

As open and inviting as DPLA has been, they have yet to purposefully and single-mindedly answer that question: What are the implications of DPLA for the library community? How does this affect our patrons? The distance between large-scale initiatives and the insularity of library work (either public, academic, school, or special) is a singular factor in librarian buy-in. Woodworth continues, “From my perspective, the DPLA is at the opposite end of action spectrum for digital content and digital rights from me. We are both working towards the same goal, but I am operating from the grassroots level while it operates from a top-down perspective.” Following the launch of DPLA last week, Library Journal compiled an article titled “Librarians respond to DPLA launch” including opinions from Jason Griffey, Jessamyn West and others, ranging from excitement for the open API to noticeable errors in legacy metadata.

What librarians want from DPLA

Themes from the various responses to the DPLA can be condensed into four broad areas that I’d propose encapsulate what librarians want from the Digital Public Library of America: Advocacy, Inclusion, Investment, and Clarity on why we should participate and how we can get our communities involved.

Advocacy

The political climate in which we function requires consistent messages, constant efforts, and collective representation. If DPLA intends to function as a highly recognizable (“public”) facet of our ecosystem, it must advocate at the highest levels for the needs of the future library. Dan Cohen, representing the interests and influence of many behind the scenes at DPLA says, to that point, “I see a strong advocacy role for the DPLA, to say that a better balance is needed in the twenty-first century, so that the landscape for reading and research isn’t further circumscribed and hindered by digital friction” (Enis, 2013). It is the hope of the library community that this will ring true as DPLA moves forward.

Inclusion

Libraries want to be included in the construction of a national digital library. Again, DPLA has worked to ensure that this occurs, and as more libraries and librarians become aware of this project, I hope that time, energy, and resources will be devoted to participating in this grand experiment. Already organizations like the American Council of Learned Societies are offering positions for post-doctoral fellows to work on the project. I would call on the library community to proactively pursue inclusion, and encourage our professional organizations to consider offering similar opportunities (fellowships, internships, scholarships) to prove our vested interest in working together to build the DPLA.

Investment

DPLA will have to prove its support for existing institutions. As a starting point, providing a portal into the work of others is an efficient strategy, but as we all know, there’s much more where that came from. How does the Digital Public Library of America plan to utilize their funding, resources and momentum to reinvest in, and enrich, the collections and communities that are not yet digital?

Dan Cohen: “I want the American public to know that the DPLA will be the place to go to find documents and images about their hometown, scanned and curated locally; to be able to pull out their smartphone, launch an app powered by DPLA’s data, and take an impromptu walking tour of the hidden past of their current location; to see the DPLA’s open and free content spread across classes from kindergarten to graduate school; and many other exciting possibilities enabled when formerly disparate collections are knit together—entirely new kinds of searching, discovery, and learning. Forget the massive technical infrastructure; if the DPLA can ignite that wonder that only libraries can provide, we will have done our job” (Enis, 2013).³

Clarity

Many initiatives that garner excitement in the library community look great from the outside, but are fraught with loosely defined goals, aims, and a general lack of detailed plans for moving forward. Librarians, eager and skeptical at the same time, require a deep sense of purpose tied to real, concrete outcomes. DPLA is close to providing that level of clarity, but additional information would be helpful, such as:  what methods are in place for rural libraries to begin collecting and submitting oral histories?; will there be a PBS-style curriculum module to engage school librarians?; is there a media campaign targeted at public libraries?; a toolset for scholarly utilities that could help with citing items and repurposing metadata?. These details would address Andy Woodworth’s question, “How does this apply to my patrons?” It is still a little early in the process to expect the fullness of clarity that many of us would like, but continuing to ask and expressing our detailed needs will keep practicality at the forefront of this developing initiative.

 These four areas require as much from librarians as they do from those steering the Digital Public Library of America. Rather than approaching the DPLA as a Harvard initiative, I’d like to propose that we take them at their word and take ownership of this as a realistic, collaborative, inclusive, “public” opportunity to showcase one aspect of value for libraries in a digital world. Considering the practical implications of a national digital library for our daily work, we should contribute to the conversation and development of the platform, the portal and the partnerships that define the DPLA. If it is successful, DPLA could be a national treasure which brings to light the value and essential qualities of our beloved organizations, as well as the physical collections and intellectual issues that we labor on daily (copyright, fair use, information literacy, access). Even if we don’t each have the time to get personally involved, we ought to articulate the wide-ranging possibilities and benefits of such an idealistic enterprise to public schools, to higher education, and to citizenship and government. In fighting for the ideals on an ambitious project like DPLA, we are fighting for our own place in the information economy.

The Digital Public Library of America is, as Robert Darnton puts it, “the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism” (Darnton, 2013). Let us then envision the grand ideal while rolling up our sleeves. What role could be more fitting for American librarians than a passion for principles blending with an enduring work ethic? It is who we are and what we do.

 

Further reading and discovery:

StackLife, Library Observatory  and DPLA Map - examples of what can be built on top of the DPLA’s open API.

Now, With No Further Ado, We Present… The Digital Public Library of America! The Atlantic, 4/18/2013.

DPLA Launches to the Public. Huffington Post, 4/18/2013.

How the DPLA hopes to build a real public commons. The Verge. 4/3/2013.

What We Hope the DPLA will Become. Open Knowledge Foundation blog. 4/17/2013.

 

References:

Borman, Laurie. Building the Digital Public Library. American Libraries Magazine, 4/19/2012.

Cottrell, Megan. A Digital Library for Everyone. American Libraries Magazine, 4/15/2013.

Darnton, Robert. The Digital Public Library of America is Launched. The New York Review of Books. 4/25/2013.

De Rosa, Cathy, Chrystie Hill, Andy Havens, Kendra Morgan and Ricky Erway. America’s Digital Future: Advancing a Shared Strategy for Digital Public Libraries. 2011, OCLC.

http://dp.la/

Enis, Matt. Q&A: Dan Cohen on His Role as the Founding Executive Director of DPLA. The Digital Shift: Library Journal. 3/12/2013.

Heller, Margaret. Report from the Digital Public Library of America Midwest. ACRL Tech Connect. 10/22/2012

Hill, Nate. What a National Digital Library means for Public Libraries. Text of a talk given to Digital Library Federation, 2011.

Palfrey, John. What is the DPLA? Library Journal. 4/8/2013

Palfrey, John. What the DPLA can mean for Libraries. The Digital Shift: Library Journal. 1/3/2013

Raphael, Molly. The First Digital Public Library of America Workshop. Inside Scoop: American Libraries Magazine. 3/9/2012.

Rothman, David. It’s Time for a National Digital-Library System: But it can’t serve only elites. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2/24/2011

–                              The risks if the DPLA won’t create a full-strength national digital library system: Setbacks for K-12, family literacy, local libraries, preservation, digital divide efforts? LLRX.com. 12/19/2012

Vandegrift, Micah. The Digital Public Library of America. Hack Library School. 5/10/2011.

 

***Thanks, as always, to Lead Pipe colleagues Emily, Ellie, Erin, and Brett for editing and challenging my writing and ideas herein. A special thanks to Emily Lloyd of Hennepin County Libraries for serving as an external reviewer. 

1. The Library Loon’s article “DPLA and the so-called ‘Feral Librarian’ is a must read for insight on Dr. Cohen’s role in the project.
2. Full disclosure: Emily hired me into my current position and was my direct supervisor for eight months before joining DPLA.
3. See also: Emily Gore’s Scannabago concept

The newly implemented Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is one of hundreds of digital libraries and digital library portals popping up all over the Web. One of the significant partners of the DPLA is the Mountain West Digital Library described as follows on its website:

The Mountain West Digital Library is a central search portal for digital collections about the Mountain West region. We provide free access to over 700,000 resources from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, historical societies, and government agencies, counties, and municipalities in Utah, Nevada, and other parts of the U.S. West.

 Of course there are some truly gigantic collections such as the National Library of Australia's Trove website with over 338 million online resources and Europeana.eu with millions more. The amount of online content is overwhelming. Here are a just few of the hundreds of portals coming online:

The African Online Digital Library (AODL) is a portal to multimedia collections about Africa. MATRIX, working in cooperation with the African Studies Center at Michigan State University, is partnering with universities and cultural heritage organizations in Africa to build this resource. Plans are underway to add digital tools in order to enable scholars to work with and add to these materials.
The California Digital Library, In partnership with the UC libraries, has continually broken new ground by developing systems linking its users to the vast print and online collections within UC and beyond. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, and has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country.
The British Library Online Gallery has over 30,000 items from their collections including hundreds of historical maps.
British History Online is a digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust, it aims to support academic and personal users around the world in their learning, teaching and research.
The Cornell University Library, Windows on the Past, is an extensive aggregate of the University's online collections. 
The European Library is Designed to meet the needs of the research community worldwide, their online portal offers quick and easy access to the collections of the 48 National Libraries of Europe and leading European Research Libraries. Users can cross-search and reuse over 16,696,516 digital items and 115,623,713 bibliographic records.
We even have local digital library portals such as the Greater Phoenix Digital Library. It is likely that there is a digital library portal in existence or being started in your own area. Do a Google search on "digital library" and include your local city or county name. For example, searching in Utah, I find the Pioneer, Utah's Online Library. 
Right now, the digital library concept is evolving rapidly. There are online services with different methods of logging in, subscribing, or checking out books online. One of the most used services is OverDrive.com. With more than 1,000,000 titles from 1,000+ publishers, OverDrive claims to host the largest digital library catalog of eBooks, audiobooks, music and video in the world. But OpenLibrary.org also makes the same claim. But whatever, there are more and more books and materials coming online every day. 
Unfortunately for the user, the different services all have a complicated set of use restrictions and methods for viewing or checking out materials. It may take you some time to figure out how to use some of these services. We recently found ourselves driving back and forth to Utah and discovered that we could download audio books from our local library to listen as we drove. If we ran out of books, we could check the one's read back into the library and check out more, even while we were in Utah. 

One of my favorite posts on Facebook that crops up every once in a while is a photo of Abraham Lincoln and a quote:





Honest Abe is right, no doubt about it. But it's clear that he didn't say that. Right away you know it's a joke.

The problem of believing the  written or  spoken word  has long been an issue for humans. Consider another quote making the way around social media websites attributed to  Albert Einstein.

memegenerator.net

Now, this quote sometimes accompanies a photo of Einstein, sometimes it is attached to an image that features people with their zombie-like stares on their cell phones. Did Einstein hate technology? Did he fear for the future? Who knows, but there's a problem with this quote.

Einstein didn't say that.

According to the blogger at the Quote Investigator, this quote does not appear in the work, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, edited by Alice Calaprice. Variations of this quote  have been in circulation for years but none of them seem to  be the words of Einstein.

So how is it that I see that quote about once a week or more, in English and Spanish, on Facebook?
Well it's like those forwarded emails you get. Where someone makes a statement about the President, or a certain group of people, or whatever and then sends it to their  friends and family. And then that person forwards it. As that vintage shampoo commercial said "and so on and so on and so on..."

And if you forward it enough it starts to seem like it's true, afterall it's all over the Internet.

Now this is where the genealogy comes in

Family stories are a lot like that. If your grandmother tells you a story consistently over her life about her grandmother, is it true? Are you related to Cherokee princesses or someone that rode with Jesse James or descended from George Washington?

Now I'm not calling grandma a liar. We hear things, people reinterpret them and tell them and pretty soon it's like that childhood game of telephone. In some cases, stories might be told to explain something we have no explanation for. Grandma must have been Native American because she had darker skin then the rest of us or we have the same surname as this famous person and my dad looks like that person so it must be true. Sometimes stories may have a sliver of truth but were "enhanced" for the sake of telling a better story. And then there's stories that grandma was telling to pull your leg but you never knew that. (I still love the fact that my maternal grandmother told one of my cousins that if he ate a watermelon seed it would grow in his stomach.)

One of the great things I get to do every month is lead a discussion for the National Institute for Genealogical Studies on an article written by Connie Lenzen, CGRS entitled, Heritage Books and Family Lore: A Jackson Test in Missouri and Idaho from the NGS Quarterly, March 1998.

In this article Connie is researching family stories, specifically those that we find in heritage books but this could include those that are told to us. Connie provides steps to determining the validity of a family story.  These steps are:

• Consider the Source
• Determine the Probability that the Event Occurred
• Place Individuals in Time and Location
• Thoroughly Comb Extant Records 

I noticed a week or so ago that Ancestry.com has changed their home page - I can no longer search the record collections using the Advanced Search form or exact matches.

Here is the Home Page I copied on about 12 April 2013 (from my 14 April 2013 presentation to the Pommern Special Interest Group):


It shows the Advanced Search fields with the "Match all terms exactly" box checked.

Here is the current Home Page copied today:


The Search Box is different from before - it only has fields for First & Middle Names, Last Name, Locality, and an Estimated Birth Year.

I put First Name = "isaac" and Last Name = "seaver" into the search fields and clicked the "Search" button:



Over 335,000 matches were found for my search parameters.  The "Searching for" column shows that my search with those names was not Exact.

When I clicked the "Show Advanced" link on the Home Page, it took me to the "Search" tab and the Advanced Search form (with my previous settings from my last search):


I put First name = "isaac" and Last name = "seaver" into the search form (Note:  I had to enter them again - why weren't they filled in?  That's dumb!).  The form had "restrict to exact" as the filter under the first and last name fields.

With those settings, I clicked on "Search" and there were 494 matches:


Note that I had to click three times from the Home Page to get the results I wanted.  Two weeks ago, it was one click - just the "Search" button.  That's frustrating to me.

I need to train myself to go directly to the "Search" tab when I open the Ancestry program - that gets it down to two clicks to get the results I want.  I could put the "Search" tab URL (http://search.ancestry.com/search/) into my Chrome browser bookmark bar also and get it down to one click, but I like to see the "New and Updated Databases" every day.

I complained months ago about the problems with doing a Global Search with wild cards in names. I tried again today and the results were the same.  From the "Search" tab, I entered First name = "isa*" and Last name = "sea*" and saw the "Too many matches with the wildcard search" screen:


That is very frustrating to me, even for names that are fairly uncommon.

 I just did a global search for First name = "joh*" and Last name = "smi*" - it worked and gave me 2,935,466 matches!  It didn't work with "mar* smi*".  Are there more "isa* sea*" persons in the databases than "joh* smi*" persons?  I sincerely doubt it!  This is not random - it happens every time I search for "isa* sea*", but not for "isa* sev*" or "isa* sea*r".

This is another of my frustrations with Ancestry searches.  They cost me time...I've learned to expect the frustration and usually search with a full name now, or I select from the database links on my Home Page or in the Card Catalog.

For the record, I have a Dell computer, running Windows 7, and using the Google Chrome browser.

I just did the "isa* sea*" search on my Windows 7 laptop using Internet Explorer 10 browser and received 30,122 matches.  Is this problem related to the browser somehow?

Is anyone else getting these results?  Can you get results with "joh* smi*" and no results with "isa* sea*" or "mar* smi*"?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/04/ancestrycom-home-page-changes-and-wild.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

Happy birthday Shakespeare! Here are more Shakespeare cartoons for the occasion!

Just a reminder, there's only a week left to the deadline for submissions
to the Third American Civil War Challenge.
  
This is how you can participate:



Did you have ancestors in America during the Civil War? If so, where were they
and what were their circumstances? How did the Civil War affect them and
their family? Did the men enlist and did they perish in battle or die of illness?
On which side did they fight, or did you have relatives fighting on BOTH sides?
How did the women left at home cope, or did any of them find ways to help
the war effort? Were your ancestors living as slaves on Southern plantations
and if so when were they freed?  Or were they freemen of color who enlisted
to fight?

If your ancestors had not emigrated to America as yet, what was their life
like around the time of the Civil War?

The 150 year celebration of the Civil War is a great source for those of us
blogging about our family history. So, let's do a little research over the coming
weeks between now and April 30th . Find out the answers to the questions
I asked and write about them. Or if you think of another topic to do with your
family history and the Civil War, write about that. Send me the link when you
publish it on your blog, and on May 6th I'll publish all the links here.

I'm looking forward to some interesting blogposts!

The following is a guest post by Tess Webre, intern with NDIIPP at the Library of Congress

Shall I compare thee to a closed format/ thou art more open and accessible. – Author after 3 coffees.
In honor of William Shakespeare’s 449^th birthday on April 23^rd (observed) and as a tie-in with the recent digital humanities day, I have decided to make a Digital Stewardship sonnet. This is a traditional sonnet; it has iambic pentameter and everything – courtesy of Mr. Boswell’s 11^thgrade AP English. See, I was paying attention – however, I cannot attest to the content being traditional.

Personal Digipres Sonnet
By Tess Webre

Want to ensure a file’s longevity
So that you can always access the bits?
First know, it’s your responsibility
And you must use your cunning and your wits.

Organize your files, that’s simple enough.
In an open format, you know the drill
Update storage media – care ain’t tough –
Keep dispersed copies, just in case of spills.

To help, for we know that this might sound like Greek,
The Signal is a blog we hope you love,
It also would be good to take a peek
At digitalpreservation.gov.

Keep studying; your skills will be greater.
‘Til next time I wish you all safe data.

 

My digital camera is six years old and I thought I might replace it someday with a camera that could upload pictures automatically to a computer or a web site.  I use my Canon PowerShot 870 Elph camera for cemetery and other genealogy recordings, library page snapshots, blog pictures, and work/family pictures.

Since I found Eye-Fi, the life of my camera has now been extended.

I purchased the cheapest version of Eye-Fi ($35) I could find on Amazon.   It consists of a 4 GB SD card:

and a USB Card Reader that plugs into your computer:

How It Works

• You allow Eye-Fi to access your home wi-fi by logging in once
• You use the Eye-Fi SD card in your camera, like a normal SD card
• You take pictures
• Within a minute or two, the picture auto-uploads to your computer.  If you are farther away than, say, 20 feet, the picture stores on your SD card and auto-uploads as soon as the camera gets within range of the computer.
• If you have the Eye-Fi Center open, you can see the pictures upload on your computer monitor:

• If you do not have Eye-Fi Center open, a tiny screen pops up in the corner of your monitor showing each picture upload:

• You can control the folder where the photos should be placed on your computer through your Eye-Fi setup (the default setting on a PC is MyPictures/Eye-Fi/folder-by-date).
• You can, optionally, allow the pictures to ALSO upload to a private web page on the Eye-Fi website, and remain there for one week (longer if you pay for storage). That requires wi-fi, either your own or public.
• You can, optionally, also allow the pictures to upload to a wide choice of social media or photo storage sites.  This will happen once wi-fi is in range.

Why this is useful

• EDITING - I can tell already that this improves picture selection and the need for editing.  Seeing the picture immediately, without removing the card, allows you to re-take as you go, with the camera still loaded with the card and ready to go.  This is especially useful for people who do photography near their computer.
• AUTO-UPLOAD – For photography done away from home, it’s nice to think that the photos will upload, and be sorted into folders by date, automatically the next time the camera is turned on near the computer.
• CLOUD STORAGE - For those using picture services like FLICKR, Picasa, or Facebook, again, upload to the account of your choice will automatically happen as soon as the camera is back in range of wi-fi, and turned on.  I have chosen not to use that yet.
• NO SD MAINTENANCE NEEDED – If you are, for instance, taking 200 pictures per day at a repository or on vacation, you can allow the pictures to upload every night near your laptop.  You can chose a level (for instance, 50%) at which the SD card will start deleting automatically as long as the images have already been successfully uploaded.  So you would never need to make space on the card by deleting images.
• RELAY TRANSFER – if you have a hotspot or access to wi-fi away from home, and you use a cloud storage service mentioned above, the pictures can upload even when you are away from your computer. I believe they may then automatically relay themselves to your computer as well, at some point, but I am not set up to test this.
• ADD GEOTAGGING – if you pay for an upgrade, this system will add location information (geo-tagging) for each photo (something my camera will not do otherwise).
• WORKS FOR VIDEOS - as far as I can see, these features all apply to videos, too.
• WORKS ON IPHONE, TOO – I was able to add my iPhone to my network, so now pictures I take on my iphone also upload to my computer.  This worked when I took pictures elsewhere, got the iphone back to the house, and with Eye-Fi plugged into my computer, opened the Eye-Fi app on the iphone.
• SELECTIVELY MOVE OR EMAIL – whether or not you auto-upload to web storage in addition to your computer folder, you can always open Eye-Fi Center on your computer and slide selected images into the “tray” for emailing or placement on the web storage of your choice.

Learn more, or check out the compatibility of Eye-Fi with YOUR camera model, here.

The post you are reading is located at: http://onerhodeislandfamily.com/2013/04/21/using-eye-fi-with-camera

Hundreds of genealogy and family history bloggers write thousands of posts every week about their research, their families, and their interests. I appreciate each one of them and their efforts.

My criteria for "Best of ..." are pretty simple - I pick posts that advance knowledge about genealogy and family history, address current genealogy issues, provide personal family history, are funny or are poignant. I don't list posts destined for the genealogy carnivals, or other meme submissions (but I do include summaries of them), or my own posts.

Here are my picks for great reads from the genealogy blogs for this past week:

*  Online Family Trees - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Lorine McGinnis Schulze on the Olive Tree Genealogy Blog.  Lorine discusses this issue with some great examples.

*  A 10-Step Plan: Getting Sources & Citations Under Control by Lynn Palermo on The Armchair Genealogist blog.  Lynn has suggestions for those who need help with source citations.

*  Useful DNA Tests for Genealogy by Debbie Parker Wayne on the Deb's Delvings in Genealogy blog.  Deb highlights how DNA test results can aid the genealogy search.

*  Tuesday Tips: Time with Thomas MacEntee by Diane Weintraub on the Nuts From the Family Tree blog.  I missed Thomas's seminar in Carlsbad last week, but diane didn't!

*  The Bloggers Best Selections, Spring, 2013 by Diane Boumenot on the One Rhode Island Family blog.  Diane solicited "best of" blog posts on Facebook - this is the list.

*  New FamilySearch Site Design ~ A Left Turn? by Lee Drew on the FamilyHistory with the LineageKeeper blog.  Lee bemoans the hidign of a precious resource in the new FamilySearch site design.

*  CAFG Forensic Genealogy Institute - Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 by Valerie Elkins on the Family Cherished blog.  Valerie sums up her experiences at this conference.

*  Forensic Genealogy Institute Recap - Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 by Amy Coffin on the We Tree Genealogy Blog.  Amy writes up her summary of the conference.

*  Thoughts on FamilySearch Redesign by Pat Richley-Erickson on the DearMYRTLE's Genealogy Blog.  Myrt shares her thoughts, and suggestions, on the new FamilySearch site design.

*  Day One NERGC 2013, Manchester NH, Day Two, Day Three, and Other Blog Posts From NERGC by Heather Rojo on the Nutfield Genealogy blog.

*  NERGC 2013: Day One, Day Two by Amanda Perrine on the Amanda's Athenaeum blog.

*  Thankful Thursday: NERGC 2013, NERGC 2013 -- Day Two  by Jim Sanders on the GenealogyBlog blog.

*  NERGC Day 1, Day 2 and Conference Summary by Carolyn L. Barkley on the GenealogyAndFamilyHistory.com blog.

*  Public Library, Not Public Domain by Judy G. Russell on The Legal Genealogist blog.  Judy discusses why public library holdings, like the new Digital Public Library of America website, are not in the public domain.

*  Killing the Goose by James Tanner on the Genealogy's Star blog.  James thinks that FamilySearch has changed course and is treating genealogists poorly.  Do you agree?

*  Evernote: Your Virtual Genealogy Assistant by Thomas MacEntee on the Archives Expert Articles Series.  Thomas describes how genealogists can use Evernote for their research and daily lives.

Here are my picks for great reads from the genealogy blogs for this past week:

*  Monday Recap for April 15, 2013 by Amanda on the Geni Blog.

*  Follow Friday ~ Fab Finds for April 19, 2013 by Jana Last on Jana's Genealogy and Family History Blog.

*  Follow Friday: This Week's Favorite Finds by Jenn Woods on the Climbing My Family Tree blog.

*  Follow Friday - Favorites for April 19, 2013 by Heather Kuhn Roelker on the Leaves For Trees blog.

*  Genealogy News Corral, April 15-19 by Diane Haddad on the Genealogy Insider blog.

*  Friday Finds - 04/19/13 by Julie Cahill Tarr on the GenBlog blog.

*  Saturday Serendipity by John D. Tew on the Filiopietism Prism blog.

*  A Sunday Walk Around the Blogs by Dawn Watson on the Digging in the Roots blog.

Readers are encouraged to go to the blogs listed above and read their articles, and add their blogs to your Favorites, Google Reader, RSS feed or email if you like what you read. Please make a comment to them also - all bloggers appreciate feedback on what they write.

Did I miss a great genealogy blog post? Tell me! I am currently reading posts from over 1350 genealogy bloggers using Google Reader, but I still miss quite a few it seems.

Read past Best of the Genea-Blogs posts here.

The URL for this post is:   http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/04/best-of-genea-blogs-14-to-20-april-2013_21.html

Copyright(c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver 

As someone who has been involved in instrumental and choral music since I was a teenager, I enjoy Glee. This week’s episode was a particularly powerful one. It was the first time a show geared towards teenagers dealt with the issue of school shootings. No spoilers here, but the episode ends with the kids together on the stage singing Say What You Need to Say.

This made me think even more about how times have changed. When I was in high school, the worst thing I had to worry about was getting shoved into a locker. Or trying to fit in with the other kids. My nieces, however, have to worry about crazy people carrying guns in and shooting people. It is a fact of life for them.

So what does this have to do with genealogy? Plenty. Genealogists spend so much time researching our ancestors. After you find the details of birth, marriage, and death, you move on. You dig through resource after resource to build a picture of your ancestors’ lives. And then you bump into a nagging professional like me, who reminds you to gather all your research and share it with the family. You want your ancestors’ life stories to be remembered.

 

 

If you are lucky, in your research you will come across family letters, diaries, journals, or other personal papers that give you direct insight into your ancestors’ lives. You can hear first-hand they felt and thought, what their experiences were as they travelled through life and what it meant to them. Unfortunately, many of us do not have those resources available to us. And without those personal insights, it is difficult to know what really happened.

But how often do you think of your own life story? Do you keep a diary or journal? Have you written down vignettes from your life. What was it like for you as a child in your family? How did things change for you as an adult? Was there a “black sheep” in the family? If so, why was he or she considered to be that?

Personally, I think it is important to share these stories. I want family members not yet born to know what it was like for me growing up knowing I was different from everyone else. What was it like as a gay kid in an era when it was considered wrong and shameful? There is no doubt in my mind that within another generation, people will look back at that as we look on the proponents of racism and slavery, and family members in the future won’t have first-hand experience with it anymore.

I want them to know why I am the only family member to not appear in my grandparents’ 50^th wedding anniversary photograph. I want them to understand the good times and the bad my family has gone through dealing with my brother’s degenerative disease that will cut his life short. I want them to know what it is like to have a sister who stopped speaking to me years ago because of her prejudices. I want them to know how grateful I am to have parents who support their children so strongly.

Sometimes talking about ourselves and our own lives is something we are afraid to do. We worry too much about what other people think. The reality is that your story is your story, your truth is your truth. No one can better explain what your life was like than you. If you are afraid that living people will be hurt or angry with you, that’s fine. You don’t have to share those stories today if you don’t want to. But you can write them down or record them. Then give them to a repository. You can even restrict access to them until after a certain time period has passed (such as 75 years after your death, when most people old enough to care now will also be gone).

It is so important to share your stories with the future. Think of you feel when you read a diary or journal from someone long dead. It gives you insights into them that you cannot get otherwise.  And your family’s descendants will love you for having left a record of them. None of us knows how much time we have here, but we do know that it is always a finite amount. So say what you need to say, and leave it for posterity.

What to do if you are upset by the news

Weekly column sharing genealogy-related things I’ve found.

New-to-Me Blogs

• Chips and Chunks, Rita Schmidt Martin
• Seasons of Time, Christine Ruggles

Online Articles

• Fraternal Orders and Your Family History Research, 4 Your Family Story
• A Hostage to Heritage: The Blog Tour, The British Are Coming, Y’all!
• Are You Aware of the Ongoing WordPress Global Attack?, Freelance Writing Jobs

Websites & Resources

• Anglican Record Project—Church of Ireland – "The Anglican Record Project, which is the work of Mark Williams, is an ongoing endeavor to make the registers of baptism, marriage and burial from Church of Ireland parishes available in a digital format."
• Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission – "The Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission was created by the Supreme Court Historic Preservation Act in 2007. Under the act:  'The Commission shall assist and advise the Court in regard to the acquisition, collection, documentation, preservation, cataloging, and related matters with respect to historic aspects of buildings, objects, artifacts, documents, and information, regardless of form, relating to the Illinois judiciary.'"

Upcoming FREE Webinars

Date / Time	Webinar / Presenter / Host
4/24 1 PM Central	What’s New at FamilySearch Devin Ashby Legacy Family Tree
4/30 9 PM Central	An Autosomal DNA Primer: Sex Doesn’t Matter Any More Judy G. Russell Association of Professional Genealogists
5/1 1 PM Central	Researching Your Roots in Rhode Island Maureen Taylor Legacy Family Tree
5/3 1 PM Central	Blogging for Beginners with DearMYRTLE DearMYRTLE Legacy Family Tree
5/4 12 PM Central	Homespun and Calico – Researching our Foremothers Peggy Clemens Laurtizen Southern California Genealogical Society
5/14 8 PM Central	Timelines: Placing Your Heritage in Historical Perspective Laura Prescott Illinois State Genealogical Society
5/14 1 PM Central	Records of the Works Project Administration (WPA) Paula Stuart-Warren Friends of the National Archives Southeast Region
5/15 1 PM Central	Land Records Solve Research Problems Mary Hill Legacy Family Tree
5/15 8 PM Central	Options in Post-Adoption Research Debbie Mieszala Southern California Genealogical Society
5/16 8 PM Central	Using an Apple (MAC) to Make Your Tree Bret Petersen Utah Genealogical Association
5/20 7 PM Central	Harnessing the Power of Indirect Evidence Susan Sloan Georgia Genealogical Society
5/21 7 PM Central	Crossing the Pond: Successful Strategies for Researching Eastern European Ancestors Lisa Alzo Wisconsin State Genealogical Society
5/22 1 PM Central	Ten Hidden Resources Every Genealogist Should Know Lisa Alzo Legacy Family Tree

• MyHeritage has released version 7 of its free family tree software, Family Tree Builder. Among the major highlights is the ability to synchronize your tree between the software on your computer and your online tree at MyHeritage.com. You'll then be able to access your tree from your phone or tablet using the MyHeritage app.

Version 7 also lets you use the sites Record Matching service, which automatically searches MyHeritage collections and trees for your ancestors (you'll need a subscription to view some results). Other updates include a more graphical look and support for 40 languages, including Chinese and Korean. Read more details on the MyHeritage blog.

• There's a new database of burials at Hart Island, the public burial ground ("potter's field") for New York City. The earliest recorded burial there dates to May 1881; however, the database covers burials since 1977.

• A new PBS series called "Genealogy Roadshow" is looking for people with family history mysteries to be on the show. Check out the casting call here; the deadline is May 12.

• Heredis is having a sale through April 28 on its family tree software for PC (37 percent off, at $24.99) and Mac (33 percent off, at $39.99). Find out more about the software at the Heredis website.

• Another sale is coming up in honor of DNA Day, April 25: Family Tree DNA is offering a sale on its Family FInder test, as well as its lowest-ever price for the Full Mitochondrial Sequencing and for mtDNA upgrades to the full sequence. The sale ends April 22; get more details about these tests at FamilyTreeDNA.com.
  
  You can learn how to use your DNA test results in our Intro to DNA Crash Course webinar with the Genetic Genealogist Blaine Bettinger, taking place on DNA Day.
  

The launch of the Digital Public Library of America

Yesterday saw the launch of one of the best initiatives for researchers the United States has ever seen: the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Watch out for rights issues

As described by the DPLA itself, the project has three key elements:

• First, an easy-to-use portal where anyone can access America’s collections and search through them using novel and powerful techniques, including by place and time.
• Second, a sophisticated technical platform that will make those millions of items available in ways so that others can build creative and transformative applications upon them, such as smartphone apps that magically reveal the history around you.
• Third, along with like-minded institutions and individuals the DPLA will seek innovative means to make more cultural and scientific content openly available, and it will advocate for a strong public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century.¹

At launch, the DPLA offers innovative ways to access millions of items now housed in the digital collections of some of the countries premier institutions, among them:
     • the Boston Public Library;
     • the New York Public Library;
     • The Enoch Pratt Free Library;
     • the San Francisco City and County Library;
     • the Los Angeles Public Library;
     • the Georgetown County Library;
     • the Newberry;
     • the Texas State Library;
     • Mountain West Digital Library;
     • Digital Commonwealth;
     • Digital Library of Georgia;
     • Kentucky Digital Library;
     • Minnesota Digital Library;
     • South Carolina Digital Library;
     • Oregon Digital Library;
     • the National Archives and Records Administration;
     • the Smithsonian Institution;
     • the libraries of
          • Michigan University;
          • University of Virginia;
          • Stanford;
          • University of Illinois;
          • Harvard University;
     • the Internet Archive;
     • the Hathi Trust;
     • the Council on Library and Information Services;
     • the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS);
     • Arcadia Fund;
     • John S. and James L. Knight Foundation;
     • National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH);
     • Andrew Mellon Foundation;
     • Open Society Foundation;
     • Revson Foundation; and
     • the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

BUT…

Now here’s the caveat. Just because you find something on the DPLA does not mean it’s in the public domain and free for us to use. Some of the content surely is — particularly items from the National Archives — but not everything. And it’s our responsibility as researchers to investigate the copyright status of the items we find to determine if we’re free to use them. The DPLA isn’t going to do that for us, although it does provide some guides.

First, the DPLA material generally is covered by the Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 License. That requires us to attribute the item if we use it and imposes other requirements explained in full in the license terms. Be warned: just about anything we might want to use (images, audio, etc.) is expressly excluded from that provision of the DPLA Terms of Service.²

Second, all other items are “subject to the rights granted within the metadata associated with each Visual Asset, if any. If you would like more information how to license these Visual Assets, please contact the relevant rights-holder.”³

Third, many of the items we can access through the library are actually housed on websites elsewhere and what we’re getting essentially is the display of what’s on that link. As to those items,

Those Third-Party Services are subject to the terms and conditions and privacy policies of the third parties that provide them, and DPLA is not responsible for the privacy practices, content, or functionality of the Third-Party Services. You are solely responsible for reading and complying with any licenses, restrictions, privacy policies, or other terms and conditions that govern the use of any Third-Party Services you choose to access, visit, or link to through your use of the Services, and are solely liable for any violations of those terms and conditions that arise out of or relate to your use of the Third-Party Services.⁴

And the actual rights may be layered. So, for example, when we access the Kentucke Gazette of 16 February 1788, the image provider is the Kentucky Digital Library, but the owning institution is the Lexington Public Library. And the rights statement (see the image here, and click on it to enlarge) says to use it again in print or electronically, we need permission.

That’s not a copyright claim — anything published in 1788 is long out of copyright — but is one of those contract claims we’ve discussed again and again in this blog. Terms of use, remember, are “the limits somebody who owns something you want to see or copy or use puts on whether or not he’ll let you see or copy or use it.”⁵

You’ll see these rights explanations on just about everything accessible through the DPLA. They provide guidance on whether the item we want to use is up for grabs or has limits. They may say, for example, “Images are to be used for educational purposes only, and are not to be reproduced without permission from (the originating institution)” or, for many federal documents, “Restrictions: Unrestricted; Use status: Unrestricted.”

In other words, this is a public library, but its holdings — like those of any library — may still be protected and can not just be assumed to be public domain. We all need to take care to respect the rights of the contributors of the content and any intellectual property rights of the authors and creators.

So always look at the rights statement, and stay on the safe side of the law.

---

 
SOURCES

1. Dan Cohen, “Welcome to the Digital Public Library of America,” Digital Public Library of America, posted 18 Apr 2013 (http://dp.la/ : accessed 18 Apr 2013). ↩
2. “Terms of Service,” § 5.1 (Content Generally), Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la/ : accessed 18 Apr 2013). ↩
3. Ibid., § 5.3 (Visual Assets). ↩
4. Ibid., § 6 (Third-Party Services and Content). ↩
5. Judy G. Russell, “A terms of use intro,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 27 Apr 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 18 Apr 2013). ↩

My Fab Finds for this week are (in no particular order)

1. Things We Don’t Speak Of by i-Descend
2. The Photo Side of History AND Because of One Photo-A Success Story by FamilySearch Blog
3. Clouds That Forebode the Greatest Evil by A Southern Sleuth
4. It's Genea-Musings 7th Blogiversary!!!!!!! by Genea-Musings
5. A 10 Step Plan: Getting Sources & Citations Under Control by The Armchair Genealogist
6. Tuesday Tips: Time with Thomas MacEntee by Nuts From the Family Tree
7. Blogging Genealogy: Make It Easy for Cousins to Contact You by Blogging Genealogy
8. The Astor Fire, Part 1: The Gift of Life by Many Branches, One Tree
9. What about the Kids? Researching Your Family Tree’s Children by Gena Philibert-Ortega for GenealogyBank.com Blog
10. Treasure Chest Thursday (April 19, 2013) -- Mason Freeman's May 1, 1864 U.S. Internal Revenue License by Filiopietism Prism
11. Treasure Chest Thursday - Great Grandpa's Scrapbook by Ancestry Search

Articles about Family Tree Magazine's Top 40 Genealogy Blogs

1. Top 40 Genealogy Blogs in 2013 by David A. Fryxell for Family Tree Magazine
2. Introducing the 2013 Family Tree 40 Genealogy Blogs! by Diane Haddad – Genealogy Insider
3. Family Tree Magazine’s 40 Best Genealogy Blogs 2013 by GeneaBlogger
4. Family Tree Magazine's 40 Best Genealogy Blogs for 2013 by Genea-Musings
5. The Cake is a Little Sweeter! by The Armchair Genealogist
6. Olive Tree Genealogy Blog in Top 40 for 2013 in Family Tree Magazine by The Olive Tree Genealogy
7. Family Tree Magazine’s Hit Parade by Moultrie Creek Gazette
8. Family Tree Magazine Top 40 Genealogy Blog by Digital Cemetery Walk
9. FTM's Top 40 Genealogy Blogs in 2013 by Genealogy Canada
10. TOP 40! THANK YOU, FAMILY TREE MAGAZINE! by HELP!  The Faerie Folk Hid My Ancestors!
11. Family Tree Magazine 40 Best Genealogy Blogs In 2013 by How Did I Get Here?  My Amazing Genealogy Journey
12. Thank You, Family Tree Magazine by Kinexxions
13. Thank You to Family Tree Magazine! by Nutfield Genealogy
14. Honored by St. Vincent Memories

New Blog Discovery

• Civil War History

In Case You Missed It….My Contribution to the Genealogy Blogosphere This Week

• Wordless Wednesday (well, almost) ~ Nathan B. Chase – Civil War Surgeon  - By the way…he's not one of my ancestors.  Could he be one of yours?

Thanks for reading!


© 2013 Copyright by Jana Last

We are excited to host a number of events in celebration of ALA’s Preservation Week (April 21-27, 2013) here at the Library of Congress next week.  We’ve collaborated with the Preservation Directorate and the Veteran’s History Project on programs to provide in-person guidance and help to those interested in saving their personal collections — digital and analog correspondence, photos, videos, and scrapbooks and albums.

This year’s special focus is on saving the mementos of military members and their families.  The Project designed a special web presentation for Preservation Week highlighting the stories of seven veterans.  This collection represents the wide variety of concerns that must be addressed when preserving these personal accounts.

We’re also pleased to co-host the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities on Monday, April 22. The Rosenzweig Forum for the Digital Humanities is a collaboration of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland.

A brief list of our Preservation Week activities is below. The full list, including descriptions of each program, can be found on our website and in the Library’s press release.

A full list of national activities can be seen at Preservation Week’s online map and followed on Twitter via @PreservationWk. And if you tweet, don’t forget to use the Preservation Week hashtag: #preswk.

Preservation Week Events

• Monday, April 22, from noon to 1:30 p.m., “Preserving Your Memories: Print and Digital Photographs” Dining Room A, on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.
• Monday, April 22, from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., “Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities: Preserving and Interpreting Born-Digital Collections:” Mumford Room, on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C
• Tuesday, April 23, from noon to 2:00 p.m., “These Amazing Shadows: The Movies that Made America”—Film: Pickford Theater, on the third of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C
• Wednesday, April 24, from noon to 1 p.m., “Preserving Your Memories: Traditional and Digital Albums and Scrapbooks:” Dining Room A, on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.
• Wednesday, April 24, 2 p.m. EDT, Webinar: “Preserving Your Personal Digital Photographs:” Free, but registration required at www1.gotomeeting.com/register/876436809.
• Friday, April 26, from noon to 1 p.m., “PAC: A Packed Agenda for Conserving Libraries’ Heritage — 20 Years of Changes and Development”—Lecture:” Pickford Theater, on the third of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C