The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
consumers, packed with straight talk - hold the sugar coating - whether
the vendors like it or not!
The following announcement was written by the New England Historic Genealogical Society:
Scott Steward and Christopher Child Share Top Prizes from NGS and CSG
Boston, MA – May 22, 2012 – The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) announced today that one of its latest Newbury Street Press titles, The Descendants of Judge John Lowell of Newburyport, Massachusetts, by Scott C. Steward and Christopher C. Child, has won top honors from both the National Genealogical Society and the Connecticut Society of Genealogists. The awards were handed out at recent ceremonies hosted by each organization.
Are you planning a trip to Salt Lake City? Do you know the best restaurants in the city? How do you find the best hamburger in Salt Lake City? How about the best Mexican food? You can find all that and more in the free 22-page booklet entitled, The Chart Chick's Quick Insider's Guide to Salt Lake City.
For those of you who are not familiar with the "Chart Chick," that is a pseudonym used by Janet Hovorka. She and her husband Kim run Family ChartMasters, the company that produces the beautiful wall charts for genealogists. If you are not familiar with Family ChartMasters, you need to look at https://familychartmasters.com. Even though the web site shows numerous examples, you cannot appreciate these charts until you see them in person. The small image on your computer's screen doesn't do justice to these large charts.
Is there a lesson to be learned from a University of Minnesota project? Could the same methodologies be applied to new genealogy books that become available for free on the Internet?
As a new University of Minnesota project expands, open-source college textbooks should become more readily available and easily vetted. Open source books have long been considered a promising way to cut costs. However, significant disadvantages have slowed the adoption of open source (free) textbooks: they are hard to locate, and they are of indeterminate quality. Few professors have adopted the cost-savings books because of the lack of quality control.
The University of Minnesota has launched an online catalog of open-source books (at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/) and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books. Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500 per book, with all of the money coming from donor funds. You can read more at Inside Higher Ed at http://goo.gl/VhSSz.
Wouldn't you like to discover something like this that you didn't know you had? A rare book almost 270 years old has been found in the vault of the oldest library in the South, but, after all this time, the library won't be able to keep it. The 1743 book, Dissertation Upon Parties by Henry St. John Lord Bolingbroke, was one of 800 volumes that planter and diplomat John Mackenzie donated to the College of Charleston in the 1700s.
The Bolingbroke book, was found as part of a multi-year search through the Library Society vaults to record the thousands of volumes it contains. After centuries, the book about political parties, with Mackenzie's name embossed on it, will be returned to College of Charleston officials at a ceremony on Thursday.
The following announcement was written the folks at Family Tree Magazine:
What do suet pudding, turtle soup and roast squirrel have in common? They are all foods our ancestors ate. In From the Family Kitchen: Discover Your Food Heritage and Preserve Favorite Recipes, a new book by author Gena Philibert-Ortega published by Family Tree Magazine, readers can learn more about food history and how to blend foodways and traditions into their family histories.
“Learning about our ancestors is so much more than just finding out when and where they were born or died,” says Philibert-Ortega. “Food history helps bring our ancestors to life and gives us a better understanding of their day-to-day lives.”
I have written a number of times (see http://goo.gl/Jj8C5) about the safety of using credit cards and debit cards for online transactions. Generally speaking, using a credit or debit card is much safer than sending a check in the mail where it can easily be stolen. Apparently, the Social Security Administration agrees. The Administration has announced new changes that will be significant for millions of Americans.
In 2010, more than 540,000 federal benefit checks were reported lost or stolen. The Social Security Administration is now switching to all electronic payments for several reasons. One reason is to reduce the thefts. Another reason is that the switch will save the government about $120 million a year. Social Security will save $1 billion over the next decade, according to the Treasury Department.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is making rare and fragile medieval books available to everyone, thanks to nearly a million dollars in grants. About 79,000 pages of medieval Islamic and Christian orthodox books are now available, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Best of all, the images are available online for free.
The conversion from printed books to electronic distribution continues. This time, it is one of the oldest and most famous publications that is making the change.
An article by Julie Bosman published in the New York Times says it's the end of the road for the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica. Bosman writes, "...in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely overtaken by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, including specialized Web sites and the hugely popular — and free — online encyclopedia Wikipedia."
I have published several recent articles about ebooks. I am a big fan of carrying dozens of books in one small ereader, especially when traveling. However, not everyone likes the new format. Now, just to make things more complicated. the Department of Justice says Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan and HarperCollins conspired to artficially raise the prices of ebooks.
I must say that I love ebooks. Of the past dozen or so books I have purchased, all of them have been ebooks. I am trying to avoid paper for a number of reasons. However, a new story by Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel published in the New York Times says that I may be in the minority. In fact, the authors claim that ebooks are becoming less and less popular. I am not sure I agree, but it certainly is an interesting point of view.
The authors of the new article focus on how easily an ebook reader is interrupted. "People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.
You can search through more than 40,000 digitized genealogy and family history books from the archives of seven important family history libraries in the United States. Best of all, it is available right now and all of it is free of charge. Every word in every book is searchable. No, this isn't on Google Books. It is FamilySearch.org, the same web site that hosts the huge databases online at the same site: FamilySearch.org.
You can perform a search at http://books.familysearch.org or click on the links to the individual libraries themselves. They are Allen County (Indiana) Public Library, Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University Hawaii Joseph F. Smith Library, Church History Library, Family History Library, Houston Public Library’s Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research, and the Mid-Continent Public Library’s Midwest Genealogy Center.
A change in technology is always gut-wrenching for those who supply products that are affected. The record companies at first refused to allow electronic copying and distribution of their records. The result was widespread pirating of popular music which meant zero profits for the record companies. In recent years, however, the record companies have relented and most are now enjoying huge profits from songs sold on iTunes, Amazon.com, Rhapsody, and other paid online music services.
Throughout history, similar "problems" have occurred often. Buggy manufacturers suffered turmoil when the horseless carriage appeared. Many went out of business, although a few switched to manufacturing automobiles and made more profit than ever. Telephone companies used to have monopolies on telephone equipment and service, until Judge Green forced the breakup of Ma Bell. After a few years of turmoil, most of the phone companies are again enjoying reasonable profits while consumers have lower telecommunications costs than ever before in history.
The following announcement was written by Terry Reigel:
Boone, North Carolina - 10 February 2012
ReigelRidge Press is proud to announce availability of the Second Edition of Terry Reigel's sell-out book, A Primer for The Master Genealogist. The First Edition, introduced in February of 2008, was very well received by users of the renowned genealogy program The Master Genealogist™ (TMG). Two printings in the U.S. sold out, and the book has been out of stock at many outlets recently.
This looks like fun. The fictional Middle-earth is now the subject of a minutely-detailed "family tree project."
Emil Johansson, a photographer and chemical engineering student from Sweden, who has read "every book there is to read about Middle-earth" has spent years compiling a family tree of every character in Tolkien's world. Supreme god Eru Ilúvatar sits at the top, but dig a little further and you'll find out how the Sackville-Bagginses are linked to the Bagginses, that Sam Gamgee and Rosie Cotton had 12 little hobbit children, and much more.
A local news story interested me and applies directly to past articles and comments in this newsletter. A private school in Florida is switching from printed books to eBooks on iPads for several reasons. One major reason is to save money. At the beginning of the next school year, each student will be given an Apple iPad. Most all textbooks needed by the student will be downloaded and stored on the iPad.
When I have written about the use of eBooks in the past, a number of newsletter readers have questioned the economics. Comments have been posted that questioned the ability of poorer families to afford the expense. The recent news story seems to answer those questions.
On January 17 I wrote "Apple to Announce Tools, Platform to 'Digitally Destroy' Textbook Publishing" at http://goo.gl/AezoI. The announcement is now official. Many people have looked at the announcement, and feedback has been lukewarm, at best.
In my drive to get paper out of my life, I noticed that one of my favorite vendors makes their catalog available online. Genealogical Publishing Company, affectionately known as "GPC," offers the company's latest catalog at:
This is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
I recently heard a story of a family society that invested thousands of dollars in publishing a book that is valuable to family members. Due to a shift in technology, however, the society may lose its "investment." I decided to share the story with others to hopefully prevent repetition by others.
Thousands of family genealogy books were published from the late 1800s through the early twentieth century. These books vary widely in quality, but many of them are exhaustive reference sources, containing information about thousands of individuals born with the same surname. The most common format is a book that contains information about all the known descendants of an original immigrant or some other individual. Some of these books contain hundreds, or even thousands, of pages of information.
The term "paperless office" was first mentioned in a 1975 Business Week article entitled, "The Office of the Future." At a time when personal computers and the Internet were still embryonic, experts foresaw PCs on every desktop that could talk to each other by network. Over the years, the term "paperless office" became a joke as new computer owners discovered they could create more paper than ever before. Millions of people did just that: they used their new-found productivity enhancement tools to perpetuate old, inefficient habits.
Genealogists were not immune. Indeed, genealogy has always been a personal interest that attracts paper. We make notes, we create photocopies, and we purchase books. We quickly adopted the personal computer as it extends our research efforts further and faster than ever before. So how did we use our new computers? To create more paper!
Millions of genealogists started reading messages in newsgroups, searching databases online, and using search engines to find obscure references to our elusive ancestors. Once we found new information, we reverted back to old habits: we printed it. Those with organizational skills then indexed and filed the printouts.
I was always rather good at printing, but not so good at filing and indexing. Over time, I ended up with stacks and stacks of paper, typically not organized in any discernible manner. Over the years, I upgraded my printers more often than the computers. I went through a series of dot-matrix, then inkjet, then laser printers. Each new printer could produce more paper than ever before and at faster speeds as well.
Good news for those outside North America! The following announcement was written by the Genealogical Publishing Company:
Genealogical Publishing Company Books Now Available in Great Britain, Ireland & the E.U.
Genealogical Publishing Company (www.genealogical.com) is delighted to announce that many of its 2,500 genealogy reference titles are now manufactured in the UK. Genealogists can now order our books from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.eu, bookdepository.co.uk, and other fine booksellers—without incurring the time and expense of overseas postage and handling charges. These include the works of authorities David Dobson for Scotland, Brian Mitchell for Ireland and Northern Ireland, Peter Wilson Coldham for England, and hundreds of other authors.
Boston, MA – May 22, 2012 – The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) announced today that one of its latest Newbury Street Press titles, The Descendants of Judge John Lowell of Newburyport, Massachusetts, by Scott C. Steward and Christopher C. Child, has won top honors from both the National Genealogical Society and the Connecticut Society of Genealogists. The awards were handed out at recent ceremonies hosted by each organization.
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