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Archiver > USGENWEB-SW > 2005-09 > 1126325862


From: "Mike St. Clair/ST" <>
Subject: A report from the FGS Convention
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:17:42 -0600


We had another very good day at the convention. I took my sweet time
getting there (I wasn't scheduled to staff the booth until noon) and arrived
to find Darilee helping a crowd all by herself. Another project member
joined in helping at the booth - Julie Miller, CC of Broomfield County
Colorado. Unfortunately I left my camera home by accident and didn't get a
photo.

We also had a distinguished visitor from the Swedish Federation of
Genealogical Societies, Ted Rosvall. He was very impressed with what we are
doing and is going to do a feature article in their next journal about
USGenWeb - which is sent to over 10,000 members of their society.

A not yet announced new publication is about to be launched and approached
me at the conference for an article about USGenWeb in the inaugural edition
early next year. I think this is another chance for us to get the word out
that we are here, that we have resources for researchers for free, and that
we can always use more volunteers and contributions of data.

I'd say way had a larger number of visitors than Thursday but I have to let
you know that Darilee messed up our scientific method for keeping track.
She accidentally (oh, sure) knocked over one of our boxes of Sassy Taffy.
Then she made me help gather them up. But she put them all in this white
sack that went right into her bag for the return trip to Washington. She
said it wouldn't be right to give them out to the visitors after they'd left
the safety of the box.

We had a visitor from Los Angeles, an officer of the Southern California
Genealogical Society, who was originally from Louisiana and told us about
the serious loss of materials in the New Orleans Library where she had many
relatives (all but one accounted for). This dear lady insisted on giving me
a big hug for the whole organization - she said we were a great boon to her
and her society, although we had cost her a little sleep from those nights
when she would start surfing USGenWeb and suddenly discover it was 4 a.m.
She's a tremendous fan of what you all do. Consider yourselves hugged!

A couple of more folks showed up who were big fans of USGenWeb, but had
never contributed anything. We think a couple of lucky counties will end up
as beneficiaries of some data these folks had indexed for their own research
and just hadn't thought about what a good idea it would be to share it with
others through a contribution to the project.

An officer of the Fairfax Genealogical Society in the Washington DC area
took the cook's tour, then said they would really love to have us come with
a similar exhibit to their fall seminar later this year. I'll bring it to
the board and see if there is time to find project members in that area who
would be willing to do this.

I snuck away from the booth a couple of times to take a look at some of the
interesting new products on display. One that I was quite taken with was a
microfilm and fiche reader/scanner that did a fabulous job, scanning the
film at 2700 dpi. Now if I sell my car . . . the model I liked best was
just under $10,000! The Seattle Public Library has 12 of these babies. But
there is another model, same resolution, that handles only rolled microfilm
which is less than $2,000. That sounds like a lot still until I remembered
my first home PC (8086, dual floppies) was about $3,500. Yes, I can see
myself getting one of these someday.

Another interesting announcement at the conference was FamilySearch
Indexing, data entry software that allows transcribing data from scanned
microfilm records across the Internet. I signed up on the spot and will be
participating in some pilot projects. This is the software that will be
used to produce indexes to the Family History Library's microfilm
collection. That's going to take a while (decades I'd say) but it will
generate a lot of free resources of value on the Internet. Maybe we should
make these guys honorary project members!

Off to dream land in preparation for one last day at the conference. It has
been an outstanding experience and I highly recommend that any project
members finding themselves in a position to be able do the same thing should
jump at the chance. It will also give you a rare opportunity to meet some
other project members face to face.

Mike St. Clair for the USGenWeb Team at FGS in Salt Lake City



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