Shar­ing our Knowl­edge
Part 4: Mov­ing Forward

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

We have described the His­to­rian Archives passed down to us from Bob Strong, our for­mer SFAA His­to­rian. We have sev­eral fil­ing cab­i­nets full of paper records, notes, and other genealog­i­cal infor­ma­tion. We dis­cussed cre­at­ing an online Dig­i­tal Library cat­a­log, as a means of let­ting peo­ple know what we have.

The His­to­rian Archives also include thou­sands upon thou­sands of com­puter files. These files con­tain the Strong Updates man­u­scripts, addi­tional Update books in progress, and other col­lected and sub­mit­ted infor­ma­tion. We also have var­i­ous name indexes and other records. The amount of infor­ma­tion we have is actu­ally quite staggering!

In Part 3, we explained that cat­a­loging and pre­serv­ing the His­to­rian Archives is merely a first step, and not ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing in itself. Part 1 does have a tan­gi­ble result – an online dig­i­tal library with pho­tographs, fam­ily albums, and a cat­a­log of the infor­ma­tion we have hid­den away in the His­to­rian Archives.

Now, mov­ing for­ward, let’s sug­gest what we could do as a next step. This is just an idea of mine; it hasn’t been decided or acted upon; but it’s a way to accom­plish a major SFAA goal with­out a large time or finan­cial com­mit­ment. Con­tinue read­ing →