SOME THINGS I LEARNED AT ROOTSTECH 2014, 6-8 Feb 2014
©2014 by Donald R. Snow,
2014-03-02
This
article is printed in the Mar 2014 issue of our Utah Valley
Technology and Genealogy Group newsletter TAGGology and is posted
with active Internet links on my Family History Class Notes webpage
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
. These items are not in any special order and if I took more time I
could come up with this many items more. Items 22 and 23 about
Provo's Google Fiberoptics and the St. George FamilySearch Library
construction site, weren't from RootsTech, but were at the same time.
1.
NOTE ABOUT DOWNLOADING THE ROOTSTECH 2014 SYLLABUS
MATERIALS
The
RootsTech 2014 syllabus material, the notes for more than 150 of the 200
classes, are posted online at
https://rootstech.org/about/syllabus-materials/ and
can be downloaded one at a time or else the entire collection all at once.
Downloading everything at once gives a zip (compressed) file that
when expanded has each set of notes in a separate folder. A freeware
program to extract all of these from their folders without having to do it
manually is called Suction and can be
downloaded from
http://www.geek-republic.com/software/suction/ .
It will extract all the files, put them in a single folder, and
delete all the old folders. The RootsTech web page says the notes
will only be available for a limited time, so if you want them, download
them now.
2.
ROOTSTECH 2014 EMPHASIS
The
main emphasis at RootsTech this year, as it was last year, was on stories
and photos. FamilySearch hopes that these will get more people
interested in working on FH. They showed ways to add stories and
photos to Family Tree and how to use them in classes, family home
evenings, and other ways. Many of the more than 100 vendors had
different approaches to doing exactly this and there must have been 10 or
15 new websites that I had never heard of before, each with a slightly
different program and ways to save and use stories and photos, many of
them completely free.
3.
GENERAL AUTHORITIES
4.
ROOTSTECH VENUE THIS YEAR
It
was still held in the Salt Palace, as before, but this year was in a
different section and some rooms were larger, but others smaller. We
liked the new venue more than in previous years since there were both
elevators and escalators to get between floors. But it was more
spread out and you had to walk further. The vendor area was much
larger this year and because the aisles were wider, it was much easier to
get around. Parking was more expensive this year ($12/day), if you
didn't want to walk very far, but you could park right under where the
conference was held. For us "old-timers" the close-in parking, even
though expensive, was desirable. It was also good to park under the
Salt Palace when it rained and snowed.
5. STAKE FAMILY HISTORY SEMINARS
Over 600 stakes plan to use RootsTech videos in their Family History
seminars this year, so FamilySearch estimates that more than 100,000
people will be helped world-wide by RootsTech this year. I think
stakes can still sign up to use the videos. Dennis Brimhall, CEO
of FamilySearch, gave several estimates in his keynote presentation
Thursday morning of what's happening now. RootsTech is now a very
large program with lots going on and its influence is being felt
world-wide. Brother Brimhall's video was streamed live on Thursday
morning and I think it's still available.
6.
MY PRESENTATION WITH MY DAUGHTER AT
ROOTSTECH 2014
My
daughter, Linda Snow Westover, and I gave a presentation on PRESENTING AND
PRESERVING YOUR FAMILY HISTORY: YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU, SO HOW
DO YOU LEAVE IT? The notes are posted at the RootsTech 2014 website
and on my FH Class Notes webapge
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons-classes.html .
My wife, Diane, died a year and a half ago and that caused our family to
think more seriously about all of our FH information and what we needed to
do so it woiuld survive longer than we did. In our class Linda and I
discussed things like research collaboration, working so your descendants
and others can tell what you did and where you found it, how to scan and
label documents so they are understandable and searchable, ways to present
your photos to catch attention, and other things. Ours was on the
last afternoon of the conference and we didn't now if anyone would be
there, but again this year every seat was taken. But this year they
wouldn't let anyone stand in the aisles, so some stood outside the doors
listening. We needed a larger room. After the class we got
comments like, "This was the best presentation I heard at RootsTech this
year.", "This one class made it worthwhile for me to drive all the way
here from Portland, Oregon and attend RootsTech.", "This was the best FH
presentation I have ever heard in my life.", "Do you have a FH company or
something?", to which Linda responded, "No, we're just FH fanatics like
you are." :=) Linda and I felt very good about how it all went and
we wish it had been recorded. Our notes are still online at the
RootsTech website, but we don't know how much longer they will be there.
They will always be available, and in updated form, at my FH Class
Notes webpage above.
GenMerge
is a good commercial program to find problems, connections between
GEDCOMs, duplicates, and loops and we used older versions for several
years when we were compiling our Early LDS database with 57,000 names of
all the early LDS Church members, our assignment while missionaries in the
Illinois Nauvoo Mission. This is now posted online at
http://earlylds.com .
I learned at RootsTech 2014 from Sue Dintelman of Pleiades Software,
who distribute GenMerge, that they also have an in-house program that will
convert a flat file, e.g. a birth certificate list, to a GEDCOM.
That could save someone lots of work typing in the data from such a
file.
This
is an online backup company which only charges $5/month or $50/year for
unlimited size backups from one computer. Right now I'm paying 4
times that much to back up 2.5 terabytes of stuff online. I asked
where their backup servers are located and they are all in Northern
California within 100 miles of the Bay Area, so if the San Andreas Fault
slips and they have an earthquake there or they have a typhoon like in the
Philippines, all their servers are gone. But the fellow pointed out
that I would still have the data on my own computer in Utah, so only the
backups would be lost. I think I'm going to switch my online backup
company since this is the cheapest I have heard for unlimited backup
space.
9.
FAMILYSEARCH OBITUARY INDEX
FamilySearch
has a new emphasis to index obituaries since there are millions of them in
the U.S. alone and they are full of genealogy information. This will
be a really helpful FH database. They had clever skits and brochures
about "Dead Men Tell No Tales, But Their Obituraries Do!" Indexers
can select obituaries from various newspapers to work on, but I have heard
complaints that they are so full of genealogy information that it is hard
to capture it all. At least they are in printed form and not
handwritten. FamilySearch is working on a new indexing program on
the web that can be used on computers and mobile devices connected to the
Internet.
The
Ancestry Insider blog has more details.
10.
FAMILYSEARCH PARTNERING WITH ANCESTRY,
FINDMYPAST, MYHERITAGE, AND OTHERS
FamilySearch
is "partnering" with these and other commercial firms and some of these
were announced at the conference. It means that some of us will have
access to more databases through FamilySearch sometime soon. We also
learned that MyHeritage has a better search engine than some of the others
and that it will be available to us through FamilySearch soon. There
is further information on partnering on the
FamilySearch
blog .
11.
RON TANNER'S TALK ABOUT NEW THINGS IN
FAMILY TREE
Ron
Tanner is Project Manager for Family Tree and talked about using it and
some new ways to edit things in it. His talk was video'd and is
available online to watch. We learned some new ways to edit some
FamilyTree relationships. These are discussed more in James Tanner's
(no relation)
Genealogy's
Star blog . The video of Ron Tanner's talk is at
https://rootstech.org/about/videos/ .
12.
NEW TYPE OF SLIDE SCANNER
One
of the vendors was demo'ing a new type slide scanner, the SlideSnap Pro,
that will scan slides at 4000 dpi in just a few seconds. That's much
faster than the slide scanners I've been using for that resolution which
take about 2-3 minutes per slide. The new devices look like a
Carousel slide project with a high resolution camera fastened where the
lens was. In fact, it will take a Kodak Carousel tray loaded with
slides and scan them as it rotates like the old slide projectors did.
I was really impressed since I've got 20,000 slides that need
scanning. I started using the slide scanner at the BYU FH Library
and that does a good job, but is very slow. This new one says it
will scan a slide in 2 seconds; that's a lot shorter time than 2-3
minutes!
13.
BILLIONGRAVES
BillionGraves
--
http://billiongraves.com --
has a new program out now and allows uploading of images of documents,
besides the tombstones. And it is all indexed on FamilySearch.
14.
PLINKBOX
PlinkBox
--
http://plinkbox.com -- is
an example of one of the many new websites that stores your photos and
allows you to add links to the individuals in the pictures with stories,
text, audio, video, and other URLs. PLINK = Pictures + links.
You upload photos and can then add the links. It's free and
this one is operated by a fellow in St. George, Utah.
15.
FAMILYSEARCH CATALOG IS NOW INCLUDED IN
OCLC'S WORLDCAT
WorldCat --
http://www.worldcat.org -- run
by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), is an online catalog
of many library collections. The FamilySearch Catalog (what used to
be called the Family History Library Catalog) is now indexed in WorldCat,
so searching in WorldCat brings up information in the FSC, as well as in
other libraries. This is the first time the FSC has been included in
any other catalog. Now if you find something in WorldCat that you
want see in the FHL, clicking on the link will take you to the FSC for the
details. If a digital copy is available, you may be able to download
the pdf and, unlike Google Books, these book pdf's have the text layer
included so the download is completely searchable itself. Even if
there is no digital copy available on the FSC, you can see the FSC
description and the format it is in, e.g. hardcopy, microfilm, etc.
On WorldCat there is also the ArchiveGrid discovery interface which
helps in FH research. More details are at
http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/blog/ .
Wikipedia information about OCLC and WorldCat is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCLC .
16.
SCANNING TIPS AND IDEAS
Some
helpful ideas on scanning and preserving were given in a class by Denise
May Levenick with a title of something like "Scanning an Elephant".
And her website --
http://www.thefamilycurator.com --
has some good helps.
17.
WIKITREE
18.
DIGESTING AND USING THE INFORMATION I
LEARNED
I
got enough information from classes, notes, and vendors that it will take
me several months to go through it all and see what I really want to use
and do. Every large FH conference is like that for me. I use
Evernote to keep track of the notes and ideas I get. Before the
conferences I form an Evernote notebook with the syllabus notes so it is
searchable and I can find the notes for a class I am attending. At
the conference I write my own notes about the class in an Evernote note so
I can remember what I learned or want to follow up on. The notes for
a class that I give on Evernote in genealogy are posted on my class notes
webpage
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html .
As an example, I am writing this article of SOME THINGS I LEARNED in
Evernote right now.
19. ROOTSTECH MOBILE APP
They had a mobile app we could download for our tablets and
smartphones this year, but it didn't show enough information to see at a
glance who the speaker was in each class. Also, even though the
notes for 75% of the classes were online, there was no link to them in
the class schedule on the app. It would have been nice to be able
to see the speaker's name and whether there were notes for that class
and have a quick way to get to the notes. Maybe next year.
20. PROBLEMS WITH CLASS NOTES
Many classes didn't have notes at all and as presenters we were told
that if we didn't have our notes in by a certain date our class might be
canceled. For classes without notes you had no idea of what they
were going to talk about unless you attended the class. They also
told us to limit our notes to 2 pages, so Linda and I shrunk ours down
from 4 pages to 2 pages and included a link to where the full set of
notes is online (
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html ).
But when all the notes were posted online a week before the
conference, we discovered that most had 4 and more pages, so we
shouldn't have bothered to follow the rules and should have sent in the
full set. Regarding classes where the speaker does not send in
notes, or only very sketchy notes, perhaps those should be considered
for cancellation, since if the speaker hasn't taken the trouble to write
informational notes, they really aren't very prepared. For me
classes with good notes are the ones I learn the most from and it shows
how much trouble the speaker has really gone to in preparation.
21. ROOTSTECH 2015
RootsTech 2015 will be 12-14 Feb 2015 with the Federation of
Genalogical Societies meeting before it on 11 Feb, all in the Salt
Palace.
22.
PROVO AND GOOGLE FIBEROPTICS
I
didn't learn this at RootsTech 2014, but learned it at that time when at
my home in Provo. The city of Provo signed a contract with Google
Fiberoptics to let them use the fiberoptics system already in the streets
in Provo and just charge people to connect their homes. They charge
$30, a one time fee, for this connection. Then for the next 7 years
Internet will be free to you at speeds of 5 gigbits per second upload and
download. The next category up is $70 per month for 100 gigbits
upload and download which is super fast. To include TV through this
system costs another $50/month or a total of $120/month. Because of
the competition Comcast is setting up cheaper rates with Internet, but not
at the higher speed. To sign up for the fiber optics service you go
to the website --
https://fiber.google.com/cities/provo/#header=check -- and
type in your street address and you can pay with a credit card. You
can sign up now and then installation will take place sometime this
summer. If you don't sign up by the deadline for your area of Provo,
you may never be able to sign up again since it requires their equipment.
The 3 US cities that Google has signed with are Austin, TX; Kansas
City, MO; and Provo, UT. They told me that in Kansas City Google had
re-opened the sign-ups a couple of years later, but only for a few days.
With the $30 installation fee you can stay with the free 5 gigbit
version for the next 7 years or you can change to or from one of the
higher priced options whenever you want, but you have to have the fiber
optics line into your home to be able to do anything with it. I
decided to sign up and have already done so.
23.
ST. GEORGE FAMILYSEARCH LIBRARY
CONSTRUCTON SITE
This
month the St. George City Council voted to allow rezoning of the lot on
the corner of 200 East 600 South for the construction of the new
FamilySearch Library in St. George. This lot is the south half of
the block immediately south of the St. George Temple. The
FamilySearch Library in St. George is now in a rented office building and
is becoming quite popular.
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