DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - FEB 2019
DOWNLOADING THE ROOTSTECH 2019 CLASS NOTES
©2019 Donald R. Snow - Last updated 2019-02-19
Don's Freeware Corner notes are printed in the UTAH VALLEY TECHNOLOGY AND GENEALOGY GROUP (UVTAGG)
Newsletter TAGGology each month and are posted on his Class Notes Page at
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be corrections, updates, and additions.
ROOTSTECH 2019
RootsTech 2019 will be held in the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah, from 27 Feb-2 Mar 2019
and the class papers were posted online in Jan 2019. This is the only genealogy conference I have heard of that makes these available for anyone to read and download, whether they will be attending the conference or not. However, this is also the only genealogy conference I have heard of that charges the attendees for a flash drive with the papers on it, if they want one. The cost is $15 and attendees can order it when they register. It will not be mailed in advance, even though they are mailing the name badges, so you have to pick it up at the registration desk at the conference. The class notes papers are available to everyone now, but only on a mobile device and not on a computer. Since most of us older genealogists use computers and not mobile devices as much, I have worked out a way to download the papers with a smartphone or tablet and then move them to your computer and that's what this Freeware Corner article is about.
Regarding the availability of the papers, here is a note from the RootsTech 2019 FAQs
(Frequently Asked Questions): "The syllabus is available only through our mobile app
for Apple or Android. There is not a desktop version." But even if we use mobile devices, most of us also want them on our computers
to be able to work with them. The procedure discussed here is to first download
the papers to a mobile device and then upload them to your computer. It's a lot
of work and takes 8-10 hours, if you want to get the entire collection, but
it does work. There are more than 250 classes and it appears to me that about
90% have class notes, pdf papers. I wish the other
10% had notes, since a few of those look interesting to me. These papers are called "Resources" and "Handouts". In earlier years
RootsTech has had the papers available to download easily on computers, but
the last two or three years they have only had them for mobile devices. Since it would
be very easy for them to post the pdfs on their website, and several of us
have suggested this in the past, they must have a reason for making it so hard
for us to have a computer copy now.
FINDING THE HANDOUTS ON A MOBILE DEVICE
On a mobile device you first download the RootsTech 2019 app from whatever app store
you use. This is free whether you will be attending the conference or not.
The app is the same that they have used for the last couple of years, but
is updated with this year's schedule and program. There are icons for
the daily schedules, Wed, Thurs, Fri, and Sat, a list of the speakers
in alphabetical order, and lots more. When you find a class you are interested
in and want to see what the speaker will be presenting, click the title and
you'll see the name of the speaker, a short write-up about the class,
keywords associated with that topic, and, way down at the bottom, Resources,
which means Handouts. As mentioned above, about 90% of the classes have
handouts and it would be nice if they all did.
RESOURCES FOR A CLASS MEANS HANDOUTS
When you see Resources - Handouts(1), that means there is a handout for that class.
The (1) means there is one handout for that class. A few have (2) or more
handouts and these are usually classes with more than one presenter. To see
the handout(s) you have to have it downloaded on your mobile device.
You do this by tapping on the title of the paper in the Resources box.
You are presented with options such as Download it, Email it, etc.
If you only want one of two papers, you could email them to yourself.
I wanted the entire collection, so emailing them didn't seem like a
good option for me, sincer I would have had to type my email address for
each handout. So I first downloaded them. Now, when you go back to the Handouts
box and click the title again, you see a new option, Open it.
Clicking this option you are asked what program you want to use to open it.
I usually click the Drive PDF viewer so, when the file is open in that viewer,
at the top I see an icon for Google Drive. It's the ribbon-folded-in-a-triangle
icon. Before starting this whole procedure I formed a folder on
my Google Drive on my computer called RootsTech2019, so clicking that
folded-ribbon icon and selecting that folder, I could save the pdfs in it.
After saving the pdf to Google Drive, you can press the back-arrows
to go back up to the schedule and find the next class you are interested in
and repeat the process. With this process you now have the papers in
Google Drive in the "cloud", but available to download to your computer or
any other device where you can get to Google Drive.
DOWNLOADING THE PAPERS FROM GOOGLE DRIVE
There are 241 papers that I now have in my Google Drive folder. I have probably
lost a few in the process and sometime I will take time to go back and check
against the original RootsTech 2019 schedule. To get them from
Google Drive onto my computer I copied them out one-by-one. I first tried
to download the entire folder and it started making a zip file of the entire folder, but then quit and said it failed, probably because it was too large.
Next time I'll try putting them into several folders with 40-50 papers in each, so they would be smaller. That would probably allow me to zip each folder and download that collection and would be much faster.
WORKING WITH THE PAPERS
The papers this year don't have the session number identification in the title
of the files, nor even the author's name in some cases, so to find the one
for a particular session, you have to search for the title and hope the paper
title is close to the session title. Sometime I will probably take time
to rename the files to include the author's name and a few topic keywords,
since the title doesn't always indicate the paper's content. It would also
be of interest to analyze the topics covered. This year there aren't
as many topics that I am interested in and it seems to me that some topics
are almost completely left out; for example, sound and audio in family history.
The paper selection obviously reflects the interests of the organizing
committee and, hopefully, the interests of those who attend. An interesting
project would be to analyze the topics in each of the past RootsTechs.
After downloading by this process, each of the pdfs for this year is
every-word searchable. If you know the file you are interested in,
you can open it in whatever pdf reader you use and read and search
the file that way. Or you could put your entire collection into
one large pdf file, which would then be searchable, but would
be unwieldy. To find all papers discussing a particular topic
you need a way to search all pdfs in a folder and there are such
free programs. A simple way to be able to search through the
entire collection is to put them in the free program EVERNOTE
which indexes them for you. To do this open a notebook in EVERNOTE,
highlight all the pdf files you want to copy into EVERNOTE, right-click,
and "Send To" EVERNOTE. Each file goes into a separate note in the
notebook you had open in EVERNOTE. For the free version of EVERNOTE you
have to wait until after midnight for them to be indexed, but for
the paid versions, they are indexed immediately and then are
completely searchable.
ONLINE TALKS AT ROOTSTECH 2019
This year RootsTech 2019 is also broadcasting 15 or more talks for a fee, besides
the free live-streamed ones. As I recall, the fee is $129 and you
have to register to be able to watch those additional classes.
I haven't checked them, but I imagine that the papers for both
sets of online talks are in the downloadable collection.
CONCLUSIONS
This is the procedure that I have worked out and there are probably
other ways to get the papers on your computer, so if you find
an easier way, please let me know. Since I am interested in the
entire collection, not just a few of the papers, it has taken me
many hours to go through this process, but now I have a major
collection that will help me in the future. I have also developed
a system of naming files so that I can find particular topics
in my family history "HowTo" collection, but that's the subject
for another article. With the downloaded collection you can use
them without being connected to the internet, so if you are
attending the conference in the Salt Palace where the internet
is "flaky", it seems like a good idea to have them all
downloaded before you go.
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