Shar­ing our Knowl­edge
Part 3: The Dig­i­tal Library

Shar­ing our Knowl­edge is a series of arti­cles about the His­to­rian Archives Project and how you can become involved.

The key here, is to “show what we got” on the Inter­net in a way that peo­ple can find us. Peo­ple look­ing for spe­cific Strong geneal­ogy related to the first five gen­er­a­tions can already find us in Google. But what about the infor­ma­tion buried in those fil­ing cab­i­nets, or the updates sub­mit­ted to us as com­puter files? There is no indi­ca­tion online – yet – that those things even exist.

My local library has their cat­a­log online. I have to go to the library to pick up the book, but I can see what they have, by search­ing with my com­puter. I’d like to do some­thing sim­i­lar with the His­to­rian Archives.

Recov­er­ing from PC/AT and Floppy Disks

I’m not sug­gest­ing that we place every­thing we know online – far from it! I’m sug­gest­ing we make a com­plete inven­tory of what we have, and place the inven­tory online. Show what we know! You can well imag­ine that mak­ing that inven­tory is a large project in itself, going through six­teen file cab­i­net draw­ers, file folder by file folder.

The result is that we actu­ally know what we have, and we know what we have avail­able to share. Some infor­ma­tion will undoubt­edly be pri­vate, and we won’t want to adver­tise to the world at large that we have it. But with nearly every­thing we’ve been col­lect­ing for decades, we do want to tell the world we have it. That’s a large part of why we are here!

A dig­i­tal cat­a­log is not ter­ri­bly excit­ing. It does not pro­vide an inter­est­ing answer to “Why would I want to join?” But it’s a nec­es­sary and impor­tant first step. Let’s look at some more inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties. Con­tinue read­ing →