[Genealib] Indexing Projects

[Tom Kemp]

Years ago we indexed the local obits online.
Card files; Excel spread sheets etc.; single printed copies of an index are
"yesterday's" approach.
We need harness all of this effort and work and create our indexes in a
formt that can be used by everyone 24/7.

We must use standard; off the shelf software. No homegrown solutions.
No more flat indexes that lead to dead end one off print offs of the data.
We needed software that was easy to understand; widely used and reasonably
permanent/migratable

I have two suggestions:

#1 - PAF
I didn't want us to continue with yesterday's technology - card files, print
indexes - so we used PAF.
Bingo. It was free; easy to index; let us add in the relationships - anyone
could download any family they wanted. We knew we could always migrate it to
the next level of genealogy software.

I liked the idea of the relational indexing that a genealogy software
provided to us.

This also let us "index" - other materials in our collection the same way -
photographs; letters etc.
All of the content was indexed using PAF.

At any time we could look up any person and see what was available.

#2 - Catalog each obit into your library online catalog.
Yes - I know - Tech Services folks might never give you access -  but if
that is arranged you have the best of all worlds.
It becomes a permanent, one stop solution to your many indexing projects.
The data will be easy to migrate to the next best level of online catalogs.
Online catalogs often present in call number order - so, just call it "Obit
Index" and it pulls the record out from the rest of the book collection.
Think library 2.0
Think about 24/7 access and not the one printed copy in your ref room

Having the index within the online catalog was a great solution since it was
always visible, all the time; always backedup etc.  People could find the
references even if they were just checking what we had on their family and
didn't know we had an obit index.

Of course, the other alternative is to wait for
www.GenealogyBank.com<http://www.genealogybank.com/>to digitize and
index every obit from every paper in the country - it's up
to 3,400 newspapers now - and growing.
:)

Tom

Thomas Jay Kemp
Thomas.J.Kemp at gmail.com



On Feb 15, 2008 9:32 AM, Lyles, John <jlyles at cvrls.net> wrote:

>  All,
>
> Interested to know how many Libraries and/or societies are currently
> undertaking indexing projects? If so, why? What software/tools are you
> using? Hosting on the web, in-house only, published? My thanks in advance.
>
>
>
> John L.
>
>
>
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>
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