Friday, December 30, 2011

Follower Friday - 30 Dec 2011

Follower Friday
30 Dec 2011


I have mostly stayed out of the discussions of the last week or so regarding the 'genealogy community' and the respective roles of genealogy bloggers and genealogy societies therein. You've probably been reading some of them, but if you have not, and are interested, Randy Seaver, in his weekly "Best of the Blogs" post this week provides the links to most of the series posts.

Personally, I support an inclusive definition of 'genealogy community,' believe genealogy bloggers play a generally supportive and communications role, and that genealogy societies have an important role, but need to adapt their missions to the future needs of genealogists and family historians; many already have, of course.

I am mostly concerned that the distinctive resources that have been collected through the efforts of millions of individual society members in their local communities be preserved and made more widely available to families and researchers. I believe this mission deserves more discussion and attention. There are many alternatives available; I'm mostly concerned that many of these endangered distinctive resources will be lost to future researchers and families before adequate solutions are agreed upon and acted upon.


What do you think? What suggestions do you have? What have you personally done to help some of these endangered distinctive resources?  I'd love to hear about them.


Comments welcomed.


Families are Forever!  ;-)

2 comments:

  1. Sorry I am so late to see this - finally catching up on some blog reading. Thank you for understanding *exactly* what I meant with the comments on my "Genealogical Paradigm Shift" post.

    Some online genealogists are losing sight of the fact that--whether or not a genealogical society has a blog, or a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, or does webinars, etc.--they still often have vertical files and original manuscript records and numerous other resources that cannot be duplicated and could be in danger of being lost forever. As researchers who need these resources to be successful, we should be actively doing something to be sure that these resources are not lost!

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  2. Thank you for your comments, Michael. It is always nice to have some one I admire confirm that I got it right. Best wishes! ;-) We all need to work together.

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