Blog
National Archives and Digital Public Library of America
The National Archives announced recently that it will help with the first pilot project of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).
According to the National Archives’ press release, “The DPLA is a large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries and archives to build a digital library platform to make America’s cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point.
“The DPLA is working with several large digital content providers – including the National Archives and Harvard University – to share digitized content from their online catalogs for the project’s two-year Digital Hubs Pilot Project. This pilot project is scheduled to launch on April 18-19, 2013 at the Boston Public Library, which will host an array of festivities, including presentations and interactive exhibits showcasing content from the DPLA’s content partners. The DPLA will include 1.2 million digital copies from the National Archives catalog, including our nation’s founding documents, photos from the Documerica Photography Project of the 1970’s, World War II posters, Mathew Brady Civil War photographs, and documents that define our human and civil rights.”
If you’re like me, you’re wondering what genealogically-interesting documents will have a home on the DPLA. There’s a great blog post on the DPLA site that talks about partnerships with state and regional digital libraries, including the Kentucky Digital Library, which has more than 800,000 page
s of newspapers, and over half a million pages of “books, photographs, archival materials, maps, oral histories and pages of other paginated publications.”
NOW we’re talking! The DPLA will certainly be a resource worth watching!
New WikiTree Feature: Surname Following
Users of WikiTree, a shared family tree website, will notice a new feature on the website now: Surname Following. Utilizing the new Wiki Genealogy Feed, users can enter specific surnames to follow. They’ll receive updates via email when other WikiTree users update information on that buy rabbit medication surname on a tree or comment on that surname in the WikiTree G2G (“Genealogist to Genealogist”) Q&A forum.
WikiTree is a free website that aims to grow a “single, worldwide family tree that will eventually connect us all and thereby make it free and easy for anyone to discover their roots.”
RootsTech Report: It’s All About Stories
Salt Lake City, Utah
Sunny Morton, Genealogy Book Lovers Group Moderator and Genealogy Gems Contributing Editor
Lisa is all over RootsTech this year, teaching and running demos and–her favorite part–meeting many of YOU! So she’s asked me, Gems editor Sunny Morton, to send out a RootsTech Report for those of you who aren’t here.
In case you’re not familiar with this one-of-a-kind (and still evolving) conference, RootsTech is part traditional conference, part trade show. Top speakers teach technology-infused topics in packed classrooms. Industry leaders wow on the big stage, amplified by enormous monitors and sound systems.
Host FamilySearch International has pulled out all the stops to make the event bigger and better than last year: there are more attendees, more exhibitor s
pace, more entertainment. A reported 6700 attendees preregistered, with an additional 2000 youth expected on Saturday and an estimated 5000 additional viewers tuning in to selected sessions at 16 satellite locations in 7 countries. With buy anxiety medication hopes to extend remote viewership in-language to ten times that number of locations next year, RootsTech is positioning itself as the world’s biggest and furthest-reaching genealogical conference.
Behind all the glamor, industry buzz, excitement of new services and products and everyday genealogists is a message FamilySearch is broadcasting to all who will listen: they want to recruit legions of new family historians who will preserve the stories of millions of lives. Though FamilySearch will continue to provide us millions of sources for dates-names-places, its new online family tree service is designed to capture stories, too, because that’s what makes genealogy meaningful to most of us.
We’ll tell you more about that–and other fun RootsTech updates–in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, tune in here wherever you are to join the fray: catch live streaming sessions and see what’s happening for yourself.
