I had a great time at the monthly California Genealogical Society meeting last week, seeing and meeting quite a few of my Geneablogger and Facebook genealogist friends. The presentation and talk by Frances Dinkelspiel on her book Towers of Gold was an unparalleled trip back in time to the California of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A great tip came from Ms. Dinkelspiel when she touched on her use of resources through the eight years she spent researching for the book. She mentioned the use she made of electronic resources available through local libraries like The San Francisco Public Library.
A lightbulb went off over my head... no longer living in San Francisco, I hadn't thought of checking the SF library website for what's available electronically. Having lived in the Bay Area for ten years now, and having moved alot, I have library cards and active accounts in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland and Contra Costa!
A quick drive through the library sites for those libraries yielded me some great treasures which I don't have access to otherwise: The San Francisco Chronicle from 1865-1922, Sanborn Maps California, HeritageQuest, and all sorts of other resources I've been laboring without for years!
So the tip is: Check out the electronic resources available from your local library; you may be pleasantly surprised!
And the question is: What library cards are in your wallet?
Showing posts with label databases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label databases. Show all posts
16 March 2009
13 June 2008
The Ancestry Newspaper Rollout: Why I Say "Meh"
As you've undoubtedly heard, ancestry.com amped up their inventory of newspapers today.
I use the newspaper collection somewhat, and am glad to see that they have expanded their title base, but without a modified, clarified... or dare I say improved search function, this new collection will be just as useless as the last one.
When it comes to the search functions for their newspaper collection, why can't Ancestry seem to get exact phrase searches right? It's hardly impossible... Newspaperarchive.com used to have the same problem, but recently released a beta search that is lightyears better than what they had previously, and actually allows you to search for exact phrases. All of the NewsBank products have great exact-term searching. The best I've seen is the 19th Century Newspapers database put out by Gale, which serves up great results that match your search query, or it gives you nothing at all.
Call me selfish, but this is how I expect databases to act.
What I can't stand is a database that forces you to wade through thousands of false hits because it can't seem to consider a first and surname as a singular, searchable unit. Is this too much to ask from a genealogy website?
Until Ancestry can get their act together and get a proper search function up for their newspaper collection, these sorts of trumpeted rollouts will fall short. When they announced the impending paper rollout on May 5th of this year, the blog had the gumption to mention that "newspapers have not been highly used on Ancestry to date", as if they were perplexed by why that could be. The comments backed me up and made me realize I am not alone in my frustration with searching through the collection.
Am I just another frustrated "Jones" surname researcher? Perhaps. But I also love much of what Ancestry does across their site, and I appreciate that they are continually expanding the role of the internet in everyone's genealogy research. And as someone who really believes in the value of newspapers for genealogical research, I wish they would show those newspapers, and this new, vast newspaper collection, the respect that it so richly deserves.
I use the newspaper collection somewhat, and am glad to see that they have expanded their title base, but without a modified, clarified... or dare I say improved search function, this new collection will be just as useless as the last one.
When it comes to the search functions for their newspaper collection, why can't Ancestry seem to get exact phrase searches right? It's hardly impossible... Newspaperarchive.com used to have the same problem, but recently released a beta search that is lightyears better than what they had previously, and actually allows you to search for exact phrases. All of the NewsBank products have great exact-term searching. The best I've seen is the 19th Century Newspapers database put out by Gale, which serves up great results that match your search query, or it gives you nothing at all.
Call me selfish, but this is how I expect databases to act.
What I can't stand is a database that forces you to wade through thousands of false hits because it can't seem to consider a first and surname as a singular, searchable unit. Is this too much to ask from a genealogy website?
Until Ancestry can get their act together and get a proper search function up for their newspaper collection, these sorts of trumpeted rollouts will fall short. When they announced the impending paper rollout on May 5th of this year, the blog had the gumption to mention that "newspapers have not been highly used on Ancestry to date", as if they were perplexed by why that could be. The comments backed me up and made me realize I am not alone in my frustration with searching through the collection.
Am I just another frustrated "Jones" surname researcher? Perhaps. But I also love much of what Ancestry does across their site, and I appreciate that they are continually expanding the role of the internet in everyone's genealogy research. And as someone who really believes in the value of newspapers for genealogical research, I wish they would show those newspapers, and this new, vast newspaper collection, the respect that it so richly deserves.
30 May 2008
China to Canada
[Via Resourceshelf]: The Library and Archives of Canada just released a database for Chinese immigrants to Canada who arrived between 1885 and 1949.
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