I was reading my hometown paper today online. I am from a small town in Seymour, Indiana. In fact, "the small town" referred to in John Mellencamp's so-named 80's hit. The leading story was about digitizing records to make search work faster and with more comprehensive results. These deja vu moments almost surprise me in a very pleasing sort of way. It is like the universe is saying, "you made the right choices."
A large collection of court records from the late 1800s are being converted into digital files by New Perspectives Inc. (NPI). Creating digital files that can be indexed, searched and accessed is an honorable task. The benefit here is that the employees hired by NPI are individuals with physical impairments that are learning job skills that will help them make a future for themselves.
Jay Trainer is the new executive for agency services at the National Archives and Records Administration. What a mouthful of a job title and his job reflects the same. Trainer oversees five programs that manage billions of information sources from across all three branches of the government.
Family-Search is a worldwide archive project provided free by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Recently they celebrated a milestone of mammoth proportions when they reached the one billion mark of historical recoards having been transferred from hand-written archives to online documents, much of this achieved by volunteers.
One county historical society is indexing images of civil and criminal offenses of the late 1800s to make the archives available to the public. All indexing has been done by hand and by volunteers. To date, nearly 1000 court cases from that era have been scanned and indexed.
Culture and online are two words rarely used together, but recently the European Parliament voted through a directive that allows anyone to access ‘orphan works’ – cultural works for which no copyright owner can be located. In addition to this, the digital portal Europeana has offered to freely reuse the metadata associated with its 20 million digitized cultural objects.
All 50 states of the 1940 Census Community Project have been indexed and uploaded to the FamilySearch.org web site. The last five states were Massachusetts, […]
The Force11 project (the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) describes itself as a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and research funders. Their vision could be considered ambitious in that they look to a future in which scientific information and scholarly communication more generally become part of a global, universal, and explicit network of knowledge.
Cook Memorial Library in La Grande, Oregon are gaining two new databases of interest to family history researchers and genealogists — HeritageQuest Online available from home or office with a library card, and Ancestry Library Edition, available only in the library.