RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: mckha489 on Saturday 01 February 20 22:02 GMT (UK)
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This in the latest Society of Genealogists Newsletter. I imagine it is not essential to be a member to be able to help.
Volunteers needed for Pedigree Rolls Project
The Society has around 10,000 handwritten family trees in a collection we call the pedigree rolls. These have been collected by the Society over the last 100 years. Some are typical small trees, while others are huge, heavily researched trees with thousands of names. They currently live in ‘Store a’ behind the desk in the Lower Library and take up more than 100 sq.m. of shelf space.
after a small pilot project, the Society has ordered some specialist scanning equipment and we plan to start the digitisation project of the rolls in March. The current plan is to digitize all of these over a two year period. We will then hope to be able to make these available in a number of different ways:
● firstly,wewillhavehighdefinitionimagesofalltherollsavailable within the library. The images are too large to make it realistic to put onto data online.
● Secondly,wewillprepareaproperindextotherollsdescribingwhat is on each to go into the library catalogue.
● Thirdly,wewillinputthedetailsfromeachoftherollsintofamilytree software and plan to make the trees available directly through the website.
● fourthly,wewillprepareafullnameindexofeveryoneonthetrees (more than 1 million names)
● finally,wehopetobeabletomakeavailableanoptiontogetafull print of relevant scrolls. However, there will inevitably have to be a small fee for this service (reduced fee for Members)
on completion, we will have made a key set of information available to members, will have released a substantial amount of space at the Society and unlocked a valuable source of unique genealogical data.
To do all this we need your help. We need some people to scan the rolls and some to produce the library index. This work can only be done within the Library at the Society’s premises as it involves physically handling the rolls - some of which are quite fragile.
In addition, we need a large number of people to volunteer to input the rolls into family tree software. We plan to do most of this work using home-based volunteers. So if you want to get involved in any part of this project please contact Christine Worthington o and let her know what type of help you can give.once the project is fully underway, we will publish occasional updates in the newsletter.
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What a wondeful resource project. Sadly i am in Aussie so cannot help physically. But i would certainly like to see a free online index made available upon completion. And publicised. Something a lot of people would be keen to have a look at.
cheers
jack Gee
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Hope the person who wrote the newsletter does'nt do the transcrpts, they don't seem to know where the space bar is.
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That’s just the way the copy and paste worked and I was too lazy to put them back in! The original newsletter is fine
;D ;D ;D ;D
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What a wondeful resource project. Sadly i am in Aussie so cannot help physically. But i would certainly like to see a free online index made available upon completion. And publicised. Something a lot of people would be keen to have a look at.
cheers
jack Gee
It looks like people worldwide can volunteer from the scans....
"..need a large number of people to volunteer to input the rolls into family tree software. We plan to do most of this work using home-based volunteers....."
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The SoG is also transcribing the Great Card Index - over 1,000,000 index cards with a huge variety of genealogical information on them. It's a fascinating task as they are arranged more or less alphabetically so each card is unrelated to the next, and you never know what is coming up next.
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Hope the person who wrote the newsletter does'nt do the transcrpts, they don't seem to know where the space bar is.
Haha that's exactly what I thought too!
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QUESTION
Are the completed digitized images etc going to be available FOC ?
It would a bit of a shame if they were only available to members of the Society or by paying a fee.
I could be interested but would need to know a lot more about the T&C’s of volunteering.
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QUESTION
Are the completed digitized images etc going to be available FOC ?
It would a bit of a shame if they were only available to members of the Society or by paying a fee.
I could be interested but would need to know a lot more about the T&C’s of volunteering.
It would be lovely to have them available free of charge. However someone has to pay for servers, specialist scanners, and all the maintenance. SoG members pay our subscriptions from a mixture of two reasons, I think - firstly to gain access to resources (and the Library is an Aladdin's cave for genealogists); and secondly because we are supporting something we believe has value. If there were a generous corporate sponsor.....
As to volunteering, the email contact is volunteering and as we don't put full email addresses on Rootschat you'll need to deduce the @ bit!
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QUESTION
Are the completed digitized images etc going to be available FOC ?
It would a bit of a shame if they were only available to members of the Society or by paying a fee.
I could be interested but would need to know a lot more about the T&C’s of volunteering.
It would be lovely to have them available free of charge. However someone has to pay for servers, specialist scanners, and all the maintenance. SoG members pay our subscriptions from a mixture of two reasons, I think - firstly to gain access to resources (and the Library is an Aladdin's cave for genealogists); and secondly because we are supporting something we believe has value. If there were a generous corporate sponsor.....
As to volunteering, the email contact is volunteering and as we don't put full email addresses on Rootschat you'll need to deduce the @ bit!
Your answer is why I asked the question.
Not being a member of the SoG so do they expect non-members to volunteer their time, effort, their own computer and to pay for the use of the electricity required to power the computer and local lighting, to spend hours and hours creating the trees and at the end of the day get nothing out of all the work?
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Your answer is why I asked the question.
Not being a member of the SoG so do they expect non-members to volunteer their time, effort, their own computer and to pay for the use of the electricity required to power the computer and local lighting, to spend hours and hours creating the trees and at the end of the day get nothing out of all the work?
Well.... I don't know whether SoG has extended the transcription request beyond members. If they have then there might be a quid pro quo, but again I don't know. Best way to find out is to ask, given the email address I've hinted at.
The transcription I'm doing and have done for SoG has - so far - not yielded anything for my research, and nor will the transcription I'm doing for another organisation. But I'm happy to do it in spare time as a contribution to the greater good. How other people see volunteer transcription is of course up to them.